Importing from camcorder to iMovie 6.0.3

[ranj]

Dear All

 

We seem to be having an issue with iMovie in our school. When teachers want to retrieve footage of one of our Hard disk/Mini DV camcorders they use iMovie to import the movie, this produce quite a large DV raw file.

 

iMovie will then split the movie and the teacher will then pick the clips they want to use and drag these into a shared area for a teacher to use.

 

When students begin to use these files, they will open iMovie and then go to the shared area and drag the clips into iMovie but when they do this it can take up to 30-45 minutes to import a clip.

 

For example if we have a import a 110mb MOV clip which is approx 10 minutes long it will take up to 30 minutes.

 

We originally thought it was an issue with the network but on investigation we did the same thing on a local mac and had the same problem, and this eliminated the network altogether.

 

We found also that when a clip like a 100mb mov clip is imported, imovie seems to want to convert this into a raw DV file and the output size of this 100mb file can then end up to be about 2gb!

 

Could other schools tell me how they use video in iMovie, do other schools suffer the same problems? is there an alternative solutions? I have been told by a Mac reseller that iMovie will convert all movies regardless of what the initial format is. They have suggested we use final cut express or ffmpegX which will allow us to convert the movie into a format that retains the quality but has a far less file size.

 

Any advice on this would be most appreciated

 

Thanks

[laputa01]

Which version of iMovie are you using and what is the Mac's Spec?

[iSteve]

iMovie works in 'raw' DV which is around 13GB per hour of video. We use iMovie to capture footage, then export the video to a format of our choice to use in Teaching and Learning, allowing you to pick a suitable codec / compression settings to make good quality, low file size videos.

[ranj]

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

 

BTW we also found a temp solution to keep our iMovie projects smaller using

iMovie '08 Library Compressor 1.2

Edited July 26, 2009 by ranj