Hi there,


Hi! I am doing an ambitious project in iMovie....where I have wound up with (so far) 30 miniDV clips each about a minute long... 30 minutes of miniDV total which adds up to 17GB!


And, I am still going to be adding between 30 to 50 more clips, so I am estimating I will have 50 GB or so!


Now, if this was linear, it would be easy to just combine the clips and export it into quicktime or onto DVD.


However, I need to re-arrange the clips ....sometimes move them around all together... to place certain clips adjacent to each other. I will not have all the information I need to do this until I have all 60 to 80 clips in.


My question is -- is there an easier way to do this? Looks like I am going to have to take my 17GB of footage that I already have, tape it back to a miniDV tape, and so forth... and then find a Mac on campus that has 60GB+ free hard drive space. I have been using a firewire drive that had 20GB space and is now full.


The bad thing is, I will need to spend 2 hours+ to separate the clips again before I can even start moving clips around. Looks like that might be a long, long day. :\ If I can find an appropriate machine, that is.


Any ideas to make things easier? Your thoughts are much appreciated! Thanks so much!


John
Bowling Green State University
Ohio

Sounds like you have more than 30 minutes of footage. An hour of miniDV is usually about 12-13 GB. One suggestion is to make sure you always have enough disk space before you start a project. In the world of NLE's you can never have enough HDD space.

Hi John,

It seems that the best thing to do, if you could, would be to invest in a new higher-capacity hard drive. You'd enjoy being able to edit from your own machine and the cost of hard drives are pretty reasonable.

If that isn't an option, another possibility would be to borrow an external hard drive then work off of this drive from your own computer, or take it to the fastest Mac on campus.

Your option of outputting back to mini-DV tape would probably work fine, but as you say, might take some extra time...

Good luck!

Try apple/support/discussions/imovie for some advice. There are people who edit on external firewire drives, among other things. Also try www.danslagle.com - he has an iMovie FAQ which is filled with great tips - and a link to the newer iMovie4 FAQ, if that's what you're using.

Drives are incredibly cheap, ( around $1 per gb) and it's something that you can use for years to come.
When I went to school years ago I'd have to spend $150 plus a week on film & developing. $150 is a small price to pay to breath easy

Thanks, all.
I think I found a machine on campus that has the space I need. A little extra transfer time has been needed (didnt find this machine until after I had filled the 20GB firewire drive), but that is the price of learning as you go, I guess. Can't wait till I graduate and can get a G5 and all the toys to go with it :)
Your guidance has been appreciated!!!
John

Just for future refrence Avid gives out a FREE yes FREE version of it's NLE on their website, It works very well but limits you to 2 video and 2 audio tracks (may be 4 and 4) but they have a windows and a mac version available, It has many filters as well as full functionality any student would be wise to pick this up as it's powerful enough for most amature Non-linear projects.

-@