Maintain both original and optimized footage in iMovie

Feb 22, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Unsoluble

I shoot a lot of HD video of my kid, and at first I struggled to find a good balance between maintaining the full-resolution original footage and having something a little more reasonable and lightweight to work with. For example, even on my one-year-old iMac, I can't smoothly scrub the full HD video clips in the editor -- but if the clips have been 'optimized' to 960 x 540, they're smooth as butter (and still look good enough for almost every output scenario).

If, when you're importing the original footage, you enable the "Optimize video" checkbox, you'll get the lightweight version in your event library, but you won't get a copy of the orignal footage as well. It'll still be on your camera (or wherever else you put it before heading to iMovie), but that's not very helpful.

If you're using iMovie '09 (v.8) or '11 (v.9), there's a decent way to do this that isn't terribly obvious.

So here's what I do:

That second step takes the original HD clip that was in /[selected volume]/iMovie Events/[event title] and moves it into /[selected volume]/iMovie Original Movies/[event title], and then puts the optimized version into /[selected volume]/iMovie Events/[event title].

Now you've got a fully organized directory structure containing all of your original HD footage, sorted by event, plus an Event Library full of nice lightweight versions for quick editing and exporting.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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