iMovie 10 - how to delete rejected portions of a clip

No, as I posted earlier you cannot edit clips within events in any way. You can only delete them.

Any trimming has to be done before import.

Geoff.

This worked absolutely great. Many thanks for your advice.😀

I cannot believe Apple iMovie designers removed the functionality of "sending rejected clips to trash." How awful and thoughtless.

I'd really like to see them fix this in an update. I could save so much space! A lot of times the "bad" section is several times longer than a "good" section, thus I bet I could cut my library size in half if they fixed this.

I stumbled across this thread when investigating all the polarized reactions to iMovie 10. In case anyone is still having heartburn over this--here's my best understanding of what happened. In older versions of iMovie, when video was imported, it was converted to Apple's intermediate CODEC. This allowed portions of the source media to be removed easily without re-encoding. The downfall to that was newer comsumer grade video cameras running at 1080p at 30 fps and even the higher grade consumer at 60 fps, the import time was insanely long. Importing 10 minutes of footage from my DSLR took hours. Now, I notice that iMovie 10 keeps the original H.264/AVCHD CODEC when it imports to save lots of time there. However, the drawback is that each frame is dependent on information from previous frames, so in order to remove a portion of it, the video has to be re-encoded. Each time we re-encode the video on these lossy types of compressions, we loose more information (ie quality). Likely, Apple is avoiding it all together. If they allowed it, some folks would remove a portion. Then, later might remove another portion and maybe another before their done. Then they create a movie resulting in 4 re-encodes each diminishing quality. They would blame Apple because their original footage did not look that bad and not realize they caused the problem. So, you can trim it with Quicktime as others have said or even in iMovie, create a new movie with the trimmed portion, share it to a file, and then import it back in. Either way, the re-encoding will diminish quality to some degree. That's my best explanation of what I am seeing. I've been using iMovie for 4 years and am relieved to see that I can import videos directly into iMovie now. I used to have to import it into Aperture, then access it through the Aperture Library to avoid the ridiculous time to encode into the intermediate CODEC, but now it works much faster. I'm in the camp of "leave the original footage alone" it's worth the disk space to avoid deleting something I can't get back. An external 3TB USB 3.0 drive is really cheap now and can be accessed as fast as a local disk. Lot's of folks I know use USB SATA docks and get cheap SATA drives and just pop them in when they need it.

Thanks, this makes some sense, although I think Apple kinda threw the baby out with the bath water. If you shoot 20 minutes of video and only need a 30 second clip, just doing one initial trim will save a lot of space and probably won't reduce the quality all that much. Perhaps someday they will have an import feature, where you can choose to watch individual clips and trim them once before import to allow for this space saving while stopping quality loss due to multiple trimings. In the mean time, I guess it's Quick Time.

WOW! I can't believe they took this feature out! I can see how this can be good for some but this make things REALLY suck for me!

Yes I did notice and enjoyed the fact that the clips didn't take as long to download. Although I keep short clips from ALL my videos to make highlight reels and this make things extremely annoying!

Question...

So are you saying that in iMovie 9... When I delete sections of the video. It re-encodes and I loose quality?

Matt, this only splits the clip for iMovie trailer or movie, it DOES NOT split the movie file you imported.

This means you cannot split a movie file once imported to allow it to be deleted to save space.

Appreciate your technical explanation of why this problem exists. Just to confirm; in the editor it is not possible to "cut" out a piece (say 2s) of a clip and have the remainder "rejoined" in the original clip? That is, you highlight and adjust both the beginnings and the ends of the piece you want to reject?

Instead, I now "split" the clip twice and delete the middle piece? Is this correct.

While I liked the old approach a lot better, I can live with two splits. However, I honestly can't understand why Apple in the editor plane can't allow you to reject portions of an existing video.

It's a pretty old thread but maybe this will help.

In my case what I did is open the clip in iMovie, mark the parts I didn't want as "Rejected", then created a new movie, dragged the wanted parts (i.e make sure the option "Hide Rejected" is selected and drag all), and exported the movie (Share > File), which created a new movie file without the unwanted parts.

Hope this helps!

Hey EsaieD, that's a pretty good idea. For myself, I just do an initial trim in QuickTime if I only need a fraction of the file. I might be losing a bit of quality, but I haven't noticed.

First, select the clip in the lower portion of iMovie > right click reject entire clip; Menu > File > Space Saver. There you go, or just reveal in finder and delete, HOWEVER, make certain you have exported the movie project to the appropriate format, and to a different directory first. If you are really uncertain, make copy with an appended file name. It seems clunky, but this is not pro gear, which works the same, and is not prohibitively expensive. Same as the way GarageBand is not for professional recording, but in the hands of a pro - good enough. Hope that helps!

I know this is an old topic but it is still relevant!

With that said it was a great tips EsaieD, thanks for that. I was also searching the net to understand why iMovie does not have any split / join feature and if it is just me who cant figure it out but i guess Apple has removed it. Your tips is not so bad. One thing i noticed though is that once i export the file the project clip is also added to iMovie. But i cant seem to find where the file actually is. So now i have to remove the created project and import the exported file. Would have been easier if the project file could be imported to the even view.

I'm really puzzled why some basic features are removed from iMovie. Also i'm missing the inspector feature. If i need to know the resolution of a movie i have to use Quicktime again 😟

The explanation by TM1nNC was helpful but still this i would love to get this features back even if i loose a bit of quality.

I dont know why but I still have my imovie 9 in a folder in my applications forlder. I'm trying to "delete rejected clips" now. hope this works.