Another Dumb Home Video Question--Mac Specific

[Jazzooo]

So I hooked a DV camera up to my MacBook Pro via Firewire/iLink and transferred a bunch of stuff into iMovie onto my internal drive (I would have transferred to one of external drives, but I have only one Firewire input).

Then I copied the stuff onto an external and I thought I'd deleted it off my internal drive, but obviously I haven't--I only have 9.72 gigs left out of 111. And of course, the computer's performance reflects this.

I've searched my main harddrive and can't find any video stuff on it, other than the application iMovie. Any idea how I can find what I transferred onto the internal drive and get rid of it?

Thanks.

[bruce massey]

Nope.

Mac has online help but I haven't played around with anything like that.

[Chris D]

I've searched my main harddrive and can't find any video stuff on it, other than the application iMovie. Any idea how I can find what I transferred onto the internal drive and get rid of it?

Thanks.

Did you name the file? You can usually hunt this kind of thing down through the Finder.

[Troll]

iMovie renders the file on import. This is why you're able to scrub through the movie as soon as it's finished importing. This means that if you were to blow away the original that you'll also blow away the rendered movie within iMovie.

Your movie is likely stored in your library under your user name.

username/iMovie/filenames.

If you didn't name your file, you could do a search using spotlight. Based on what you said I'm taking a guess that your camera does not use minidv tape, that it uses a chip. If so, there is a good chance you could search using this *.avi

I believe you can change where to store the file by going in the user preferences from within iMovie. This will only help you for future imports. If you find that you use iMovie a lot, you may want to consider upgrading to Final Cut Express - it's around $100 but offers so much more editing capabilities.

I've gone full circle - video is a difficult medium to work well on a home computer and the technology is changing as fast as digital cameras. Now HD is the norm, which requires a state of the art 2x4 core machine to run with any amount of speed. In less than 5 years you'll see DSLRs and Video merging into a single format. Cameras will easily shoot 29 frames per second with 24meg files.