iMovie 09 best practises and keeping filesizes small


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Hi

After numerous Disk space issues on our Apple network, we have decided to upgrade our tiger 10.4 network over to 10.5 leopard with the latest version of iMovie.

As we are a school and had numerous students creating iMovie projects, we were finding students projects were taking huge amounts of disk space.

Our students were using JVC Hard Drive camcorders to get footage and import this into iMovie 06. We found that because iMovieHD works in 'raw' DV which is around 13GB per hour of video and quickly we found our 3.5tb of network storage was slowly running out.

Now we have upgraded to the new version, I want to ensure we dont make the same mistakes. As we are a school the highest quality of video is NOT needed, we just need viewable quality video and video sufficient enough to work with in iMovie for simple school projects.

Could other users tell me what best practises are when working with video in iMovie, I am particularly interested hearing from users who use iMovie on a network. On iMovieHD we would convert the raw DV file into mp4 using freeware tool such as ffmpeg but this is time consuming and its not possible for us to teach students to do this as they have limited time in lesson anyway.

I am worried that using these hard drive camcorders we may have similar issues when importing footage into iMovie 09. Is there a way we can tell iMovie that when a movie is imported that it can automatically compresses it or it uses a different compression method to ensure project,movie files dont increase dramatically in size?

We have been testing a flip camera (http://www.theflip.com/) and these dont require a firewire cable, just simply plug into USB and are very easy for students to get video to use in iMovie. They are also adequate quality for a school environment and files sizes are smaller. This is a solution but is this the only one?

Any suggestions and advice on this would be appreciated.

Thank you

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Were your JVC camcorders AVCHD? I believe importing those required it to convert to Apple Intermediate Codec for editing, which requires a ton of space because of the high bitrate. (non-compressed)

The flip cameras should be fine with iMovie 09 though. They're just regular mpeg-4 AVI/MP4 files. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3290

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