I'm a little confused about how iMovie handles files ("projects"). The
"help" function was not helpful.

I've imported about 45 minutes of video from my DV camera. I played
around with it and made a 4:00 music video. I copied and pasted clips
out of the 45 minutes and cut those down so that I still had all of the
original video in case I screwed up.

Now I'd like to save my 4:00 video and do some other editing with the
rest of the video. My Mac instincts say to do "Save as" and then start
working from scratch, since that's what I'd do with, say, a Word or
Excel document, but that isn't an option in iMovie.

It appears that I can select "New project" and then import all of the
video from the old project, but my feeling was that it was just going to
copy all of the video, leaving me with duplicate video, and that's not
what I really want to do. I'd like to have all of my clips there, make a
video, save it, make another video from the original clips, save that,
etc.

I guess one big problem is that it's not at all clear to me how iMovie
is storing video and files. It would seem to me that maybe it should
keep the clips in one place and just use pointers to the original
footage when you edit, but I can't tell if that's what it's doing. I
really don't want to have multiple copies of 10GB of video on my hard
drive.

Another thing that makes me think things might be done a little
strangely is that you can't just dump a file into the folder associated
with a project, because iMovie tells you immediately that it doesn't
belong there.

Anyway, I would appreciate any insights you can give me on this topic.
Thanks!

--Harold Buck


"I used to rock and roll all night,
and party every day.
Then it was every other day. . . ."
-Homer J. Simpson

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 21:00:15 -0800, Harold Buck wrote
(in message <no_one_knows-DCF46B.21001515112003@comcast.ash.giganews.com>):

> I'm a little confused about how iMovie handles files ("projects"). The
> "help" function was not helpful.
>
> I've imported about 45 minutes of video from my DV camera. I played
> around with it and made a 4:00 music video. I copied and pasted clips
> out of the 45 minutes and cut those down so that I still had all of the
> original video in case I screwed up.
>
> Now I'd like to save my 4:00 video and do some other editing with the
> rest of the video. My Mac instincts say to do "Save as" and then start
> working from scratch, since that's what I'd do with, say, a Word or
> Excel document, but that isn't an option in iMovie.
>
> It appears that I can select "New project" and then import all of the
> video from the old project, but my feeling was that it was just going to
> copy all of the video, leaving me with duplicate video, and that's not
> what I really want to do. I'd like to have all of my clips there, make a
> video, save it, make another video from the original clips, save that,
> etc.
>
> I guess one big problem is that it's not at all clear to me how iMovie
> is storing video and files. It would seem to me that maybe it should
> keep the clips in one place and just use pointers to the original
> footage when you edit, but I can't tell if that's what it's doing. I
> really don't want to have multiple copies of 10GB of video on my hard
> drive.
>
> Another thing that makes me think things might be done a little
> strangely is that you can't just dump a file into the folder associated
> with a project, because iMovie tells you immediately that it doesn't
> belong there.
>
> Anyway, I would appreciate any insights you can give me on this topic.
> Thanks!
>
> --Harold Buck
>
>
> "I used to rock and roll all night,
> and party every day.
> Then it was every other day. . . ."
> -Homer J. Simpson

iMovie has two basic items per project, the media files (clips, etc.) and a
project file, basically a text file that tracks what has been done to the
project. To manually clone the project you would want to duplicate both
items. I don't know about copying via the 'save as' menu, but I do know about
an excellent iMovie newsgroup on Yahoo where you should be able to get any
iMovie question answered. Just go to Yahoo Groups and search for iMovie.

Steve C