imovie help!
Hey all,
I am in a pickle and hoping someone may have some advice here.
Let me set the scene before i get ahead of myself... recently my mom and 4 friends each took part in a horse riding clinic over a period of 5 days, and i had the job of recording each days' riding to dv. At the end of each day, to clear dv tapes, i offloaded the dv via imovie to an external hd. This has left me with 5 separate imovie projects - one for each day.
My first problem is that while i have a project for each day, with everyones footage, it has now been asked of me that i create a project of each person's footage spanning the 5 day clinic (imagine this as a burned dvd if it helps, as that is what i hope to do with this - instead of a dvd for each day with every person, they want a dvd of each person over the 5 days). While i can imagine a way around this, the problem rears its ugly head when i inform you that i have no remaining hd space anywhere! Therefore i can not simply copy and paste each clip file without risk of losing it.
My first step to addressing this was to name each clip in imovie, so that i could identify the source files, however these names are not reflected in the actual file name, and so don't help with manipulating the folders. To rename the files themselves, i would have to open each separately and name them - a long task considering there are around a 1000 clips! As such, i am pleading to you all for a possible solution to this crisis.
A secondary issue to this is the process of compressing these projects to fit on dvd. The total footage is around 180gb, and i figure i have 25gb of dvd space to work with (approx - 4.7gb for each person's footage). How on earth does this fit onto a dvd?! I'm not familiar with dv video, but do that it needs to be compressed, but how on earth do i decide at what rate to compress? Anyone who can offer advice would be much loved by me!
I hope this makes sense. I've read it over and over and it sounds ok in my head, but i know what i'm trying to say! If there's something unclear, please ask.
Thanks mucho in advance for you advice.
P.S. Did i mention i have a deadline for this of about a week, and i wanted to put in idvd menus too!
I am in a pickle and hoping someone may have some advice here.
Let me set the scene before i get ahead of myself... recently my mom and 4 friends each took part in a horse riding clinic over a period of 5 days, and i had the job of recording each days' riding to dv. At the end of each day, to clear dv tapes, i offloaded the dv via imovie to an external hd. This has left me with 5 separate imovie projects - one for each day.
My first problem is that while i have a project for each day, with everyones footage, it has now been asked of me that i create a project of each person's footage spanning the 5 day clinic (imagine this as a burned dvd if it helps, as that is what i hope to do with this - instead of a dvd for each day with every person, they want a dvd of each person over the 5 days). While i can imagine a way around this, the problem rears its ugly head when i inform you that i have no remaining hd space anywhere! Therefore i can not simply copy and paste each clip file without risk of losing it.
My first step to addressing this was to name each clip in imovie, so that i could identify the source files, however these names are not reflected in the actual file name, and so don't help with manipulating the folders. To rename the files themselves, i would have to open each separately and name them - a long task considering there are around a 1000 clips! As such, i am pleading to you all for a possible solution to this crisis.
A secondary issue to this is the process of compressing these projects to fit on dvd. The total footage is around 180gb, and i figure i have 25gb of dvd space to work with (approx - 4.7gb for each person's footage). How on earth does this fit onto a dvd?! I'm not familiar with dv video, but do that it needs to be compressed, but how on earth do i decide at what rate to compress? Anyone who can offer advice would be much loved by me!
I hope this makes sense. I've read it over and over and it sounds ok in my head, but i know what i'm trying to say! If there's something unclear, please ask.
Thanks mucho in advance for you advice.
P.S. Did i mention i have a deadline for this of about a week, and i wanted to put in idvd menus too!
Comments
I know you don't want to hear this but my first suggestion is go out and get a couple of large hard drives then use one as a back up and another as a work space. I would be terrified of having something important existing only on one hard drive. If you don't have two FW ports then get a FW hub also.
I don't use iMovie that much. I think I would tackle this by identifying the clips from each rider and copying them to the new hard drive. Then you could build a project from that for each rider. Now you could export a QT movie for each rider. Then in iDVD open a new project and import each of the five QT movies into iDVD.
I'm not sure but I suspect you could open a new project on the blank HD and in iMovie import clips from other projects.
You can fit up to about two hours of video on one DVD. It would be smart to shoot for something like 100 minutes per DVD for safety.
One week huh? This sounds like a summer long project. Have fun!
after this project, i highly recommend at least getting final cut express so you never have this problem again.
I have imovie 4 (or whatever was before the last one) so it stores the media in a folder (although the files have no icon) if i did go through and rename all these files individually (even though that will mess up the imove project) will they be workable elsewhere? (i.e. can i treat them like other files - move them around, reimport them into imovie etc?)
Thanks.
Originally posted by your_ad_here
P.S. What do you guys do when importing dv? Are there any applications you use to catalogue them? (I've been looking at foottrack but am unsure if it is good enough to warrant the licence fee).
final cut is pretty good at managing files (via the media manager), so when your ram comes, check it out.
you should be fine renaming those files and moving them around. if imovie freaks out, i think the only thing that will happen is the clip goes "offline" in your project file, but your source files will be there.
Originally posted by your_ad_here
Thanks for the advice!
You also might want to post your question on the Apple Support iMovie discussion board. There are some very knowledgeable people there who are very willing to give help.
Thanks for the headsup! I'm slowly getting around this issue now through selective storage management (i'm using the spare 20gb on my ipod) and extensive file changes (i just found out that if you use a "/" symbol in a dv vie file, imovie won't keep it within the clip panel/timeline after saving the project. bleh), but i will make sure to use the board if i have any other questions...
One thing i can certainly say after undertaking this project is that Apple needs to come out with a separate media manager (ala the one in final cut) but as a separate app for digital video. Maybe even as part of the next ilife. With the focus on digital video and the increase in hard drive sizes, a solution similar to iphoto would be ideal. I remember there was some talk of this a while ago, but that was a more professional, xsan linked project. Anyone have any news on this?
Originally posted by your_ad_here
One thing i can certainly say after undertaking this project is that Apple needs to come out with a separate media manager (ala the one in final cut) but as a separate app for digital video. Maybe even as part of the next ilife. With the focus on digital video and the increase in hard drive sizes, a solution similar to iphoto would be ideal. I remember there was some talk of this a while ago, but that was a more professional, xsan linked project. Anyone have any news on this?
there are some 3rd party apps for things like this. you capture everything using this app, and then you organize and manage using it too. personally, i don't like that idea, because i'd rather have a small project file (that can easily be changed) pointing to a media file rather than dealing with the source file itself. also, i keep everything for a project together, then wipe it out after i have a disk image of the finished project. like i said though--totally my preferences and i understand where you are coming from.
Originally posted by your_ad_here
? A secondary issue to this is the process of compressing these projects to fit on dvd. ?
compression: one hour dv = ~13Gb, using iDVD you can fit 2hours (26Gb) on a single DVD-r (4,4Gb), because iDVD converts from dv to mpeg2 compression, so don't be afraid of that? iDVD is just "interested" in length not gigabytes?
? - instead of a dvd for each day with every person, they want a dvd of each person over the 5 days). While i can imagine a way around this, the problem rears its ugly head when i inform you that i have no remaining hd space anywhere! Therefore i can not simply copy and paste each clip file without risk of losing it.. ?
indeed, you're in big trouble?
a) get another fw drive? rent? "testdrive"? friends?
b) get a camcorder, export projects, import in new order
c) export single clips on data-dvd (~20min of video per data-dvd)>>no conversion (as mpeg2/video DVD), no qialuty loss; disadvantage: dozends of dvd-rs
d) you can start a new iM project; in finder drag n drop the "clips" from old projects to new ones; restart iM; new projects will recognize "unknown clips"? a bit risky, but works?
=========
one more thing:
your system HD shouldn't be to much overcrowded? the system itself needs ~4 - 6GB for running smoothly, iM needs some extra space and esp. iDVD needs in the process of authoring dvds 12 - 14Gb (!) of free hd for some inbetween-files?
think about Plan A)
I think because they hide the compression aspect of idvd i was thrown off a little...
I took a risk and went with the file drag n' drop technique into new imovie projects. Although it has taken me many hours, I have now got 5 idvd projects ready for burning!
Thanks for all the advice.
I am having a problem buring my idvd project to an external Lacie DVD Burner.
I checked the Lacie website and it says idvd does not support external dvd burners. Is this true?? If so, what do i do?
(P.S I'm using idvd 4.0.1)