Help me understand voiceover/narration in imovie. Please.

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Level 1

25 points

Help me understand voiceover/narration in imovie. Please.

Hi all.

I am putting a movie together and recording some voiceover/narrations.

I am horrible at speaking so I am doing a lot of retakes. i.e. record, I screw up and then delete and re record.

It numbers each recording. I am using like 5 different recordings in the movie, but the recordings are numbered to like 35. This means I have done 35 takes and only using like 5 of them, the other 30 I deleted because I screwed up.

So my question is... when I delete a recording... is it deleted? Or is it stored somewhere, and if so, where?

Am I clogging up my hard drive with botched recordings?

I only want the recordings I am using and not all the bad takes I deleted.

Thanks.

MacBookPro

Posted on May 6, 2013 10:28 AM

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Answer 1

May 7, 2013 4:03 AM in response to Tigervision

The voiceovers are stored in the project's package contents file.

In Finder, locate the project in your Home folder "<your user name>/Movies/iMovie Projects", if stored on your internal drive. On an external drive it will be at the top level in the folder Movies/iMovie Projects.

In the iMovie Projects folder, right-click (or Control-click) on the name of your project. From the pop-up menu that appears, select Show Package Contents. In this folder you should see all the voiceovers that are still active (that is, all that have not been deleted). The voiceovers will be named "Voiceover Recording xx.caf" (where xx is the number ascribed to the recording). Given that you've deleted some recordings, the numbers will not be consecutive, so could show something like 3, 6, 10, 18, 35 for example.

John

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Answer 2

Tigervision Author

Level 1

25 points

May 7, 2013 8:24 AM in response to John Cogdell

Thanks John...

Many thanks for explaining. I'll check when I get home.

I am assuming that when you close imovie it truely deletes the recordings that you deleted within the project?

Because if you click edit undo, you can bring them back while working on a project.

But it does sound like it does truely delete them at some point and not clog up space.

Which is good, because inevitably, I screw up the last few seconds of a voice over and have to keep redoing it 😉

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Answer 3

May 8, 2013 12:56 AM in response to Tigervision

Tigervision wrote:

I am assuming that when you close imovie it truely deletes the recordings that you deleted within the project? Because if you click edit undo, you can bring them back while working on a project.

Yes, that's my assumption too. The non-destructive editing function in iMovie will preserve anything you've deleted, but only while iMovie is open. Once you close iMovie, you are not able to use the Undo feature.

John

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Answer 4

Tigervision Author

Level 1

25 points

May 8, 2013 10:32 AM in response to John Cogdell

You are exactly right John. I checked it. Tahnks very much!

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