Vary the iMovie 4 maximum clip size

Oct 12, '05 06:06:00AM

Contributed by: jms1

I go to a lot of stand-up comedy shows. Sometimes I bring my video camera and record the shows, and make DVDs for the comics. When iMovie 4 "captures" a video stream from my camera, it stores the incoming DV stream as a set of "Clip 01", "Clip 02," etc. files. It builds each file up to just below 2GB before ending one clip and starting the next.

Last week, one of the comics wanted a copy of the original DV files from the camera, so his brother (who does professional video production) could use it to make promotional materials. In the past, I have done this by selecting three minutes' worth of video and exporting it to a DV file. I would repeat this over and over again until I reached the end of the performance (these are stand-up comedy shows.)

However, I found that the com.apple.iMovie3.prefs file (in your user's Library -> Preferences directory) contains a key called AutoSceneDetectMaxBytes: %d (yes, there's a space in the key name), which contains the maximum size for each file. By changing this limit to 670000000, iMovie now cuts off the clips at just under 670MB, which is the perfect size to burn to a standard CDR.

[robg adds: I have iMovie HD, and I don't have any such key in my prefs file. I also don't have a long DV clip to test it with, but I'm guessing that adding the key and value should work in iMovie HD as well.]

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