iMovie 10.1 and some standard def video
 

Doing an experiment....

15" MacPro 2.5GHz i7 8gb ram
Internal SSD
OWC ThunderBay Mini loaded with (4) 500GB 7200 RPM drives - Thunderbolt connection
SoftRaid used for Raid 1 (stripe) on 2 drives to make 2 volumes (2 drives per volume)

I had some SD DV tapes that I digitized into Adobe CC on a PC. I connected an OWC envoy pro formatted EXFAT to the PC to copy over 33gb of video. I then connected it to the MacPro and copied to the first volume. Started up iMovie 10.1 and imported all the footage. It looked like all the footage was stored locally on the internal drive as opposed to having the option to choose where it was saved. I closed iMovie and found the file on the internal drive and then moved it to the second volume. I deleted the footage on the internal drive. I then started up iMovie and imported the file from the external, the second volume. The project pulled up fine and when I revealed the footage location in the finder it was on the external drive. This is good. Footage is 960 x 540 or something odd. 720 x 480 4:3 is native, but iMovie 10.1 is all 16:9 probably.

There doesn't seem to be a way to set the project up with a scratch disk before importing. Seems iMovie is a program that likes to do everything for you. It also appears that iMovie 10.1 doesn't have anything like the mercury engine in Premiere where you just have to point to the video and it plays in the timeline. Seems iMovie is like FCP7 where there is a mezzanine codec behind the scenes. I know there is something in FCPX where you can chose to create "optimized" files or something like that. Maybe that's partying like 15 years ago with "offline" and "online edits".

This post has no point. Just chillin'. :)

Re: iMovie 10.1 and some standard def video
 

Hi Phil

The iMovie HD 6.02 and 6.03 updater are still available from Apple for download. I don't know what the latest OSX version they will run on is, but it sure had 4:3.