I have a lot of movies on my computer and need to free up memory. What is the best solution, if I think I may need these movies in the future?

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Level 1

13 points

I have a lot of movies on my computer and need to free up memory. What is the best solution, if I think I may need these movies in the future?

I'm an elementary music teacher and my students perform regularly so I have a lot of their performances on my computer. Now I need to free up memory so am wondering what the best solution would be, given that I may need access to these movies again in the future.

I do have an external hard drive, but have never been able to figure out if you can store movies on it, instead of on the computer hard drive.

Thanks so much!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), also have iMovie and iDVD

Posted on Jun 1, 2013 6:43 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 1, 2013 6:47 AM in response to iteachmusic

Anything you can store on your mac you can store on your external hard drive. I would move the folder of your movies to your external hard drive. If you don't carry your hard drive with you all the time transfer a few movies as you need them then put them back when you're done.

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Answer 2

iteachmusic Author

Level 1

13 points

Jun 1, 2013 7:30 AM in response to uselessSABOTAGE

That would be the perfect solution! Is there a certain process to go through, to move the movies from the hard drive (some are in iDVD, some in iMovie, some in Disk Utility)?

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Answer 3

Old Toad

Level 10

207,721 points

Jun 1, 2013 11:22 AM in response to iteachmusic

In iDVD projects the source files are only linked to so they would be located in their original location. That is unless you created an archive iDVD project file, XXXX Archived.dvdproJ, which copies the source files into the project file and deleted the original source files.

IMovie saves it's files in your Home/Movies folder in folders titled iMovie Events and iMovie Projects.

Disk Utility does not store files. It creates and burns disk images among it's other festures.

OT

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Answer 4

iteachmusic Author

Level 1

13 points

Jun 1, 2013 2:52 PM in response to Old Toad

Not sure I understand about Disk Utility. Long before I was using iMovie or iDVD on my computer, I would insert a DVD, and save it in Disk Utility, so that I can go back at any time and burn another copy. If Disk Utility isn't saving the original movie, then where were they saved?

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Answer 5

Old Toad

Level 10

207,721 points

Jun 2, 2013 10:37 AM in response to iteachmusic

What you were doing was burning the iDVD project or iMovie project to a DVD data disk with Disk Image. If you have those disks you can retrienve them to your Mac to use again.

Disk Utility only does the burning. It doesn't save anything on your Mac.

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Answer 6

J Keller

Level 4

2,750 points

Jun 2, 2013 11:35 PM in response to iteachmusic

Good evening,

I see you have another post about deleting movies and iDVD projects. Wanting the video to be available in the future is a significant criteria because video files are very large and are very compressed to fit on a DVD. If you want the video to be available in the future for additional editing (eg, highlights of the year), ideally you'd want to save the video in a format which will easily allow this. To me, this suggests you delete the iDVD projects but keep the iMovie files for future editing. This accomplishes the easy editing objective but keeps a lot of large files on your hard drive (each iMovie/iDVD project will be about 20% smaller -- assuming a 4 to 1 compression).

If you are willing to accept some additional work in the future and are okay with some reduction in video quality, you can pull sections from an existing DVD and use iMovie to combine them. The extra work is required to decompress the DVD, and this is also the reason for loss of some sharpness. This strategy reduces the file size of your combined projects by about 80% if you save disc images (virtual DVDs), or if you save the physical DVDs, you save 100% of the space.

I'd decide about the tradeoffs before jumping into action.

John

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