Can I use the same media clips for multiple movies?

Question

What I'd like to do is import about 15 - 20 hours of camcorder footage, and use that to cut several different iMovies. These are home movies that cover about 5 years, so I'd like to make a Halloween movie using just the halloween clips, and then make a christmas movie, and a birthday movie, etc.
Is there a way to do this without having every separate iMovie import its own clips? Or in other words can I have all of my imported media sharing by multiple iMovies? Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Anthony

Answer 1

Welcome to the forum, Anthony.
It's a good question, with no easy answers. Every few weeks someone asks a similar question here. They plan to import many hours of video into iMovie, then build multiple projects from that video. Some have already imported the video and are trying to deal with a huge, unmanageable project.
iMovie isn't designed to share Media files -- the video files iMovie HD imports to the Media folder of the project package. (To look inside the package, Control-click on the package icon and choose "Show Package Contents" from the popUp menu.) Rather, iMovie HD requires each project has its own Media files.
iMovie HD is a non-destructive editing environment, which means the entire Media file supporting a clip "sticks" to the clip -- the entire file. The file is never shortened. The file is discarded by iMovie only if you discard every clip associated with that file. In other words, stuff tends to stick around. And the stuff of 15-20 hours of video is large enough to fill a huge hard drive. So we're talking lots of stuff x 2 or 3 here, which is a lot of stuff.
As you import the video, iMovie HD creates a new Media file at each scene break. Some of those files can be very large -- 12 GB if the hour has no breaks -- so before long your multiple projects are consuming huge amounts of disk space. Although you can Copy and Paste clips between projects, doing so duplicates the entire source file of the clip. So a 20 second clip that's part of a 4 GB Media file that you Copy from Project A to Project B now consumes an ADDITIONAL 4 GB of disk space in Project B.
When projects reach huge, many users give up in frustration. They've invested lots of time accumulating the video, but they have so much stuff they don't know what to do with it. And sometimes the project size causes iMovie to choke.
Everything is a lot easier if you plan ahead. Plan WAY ahead. Consider importing just the video you need for each of the (small) projects. Finish one project at a time, then move on to the next one.
The trick is to view all the video before you begin, and make an index of what video you want to keep, what you want to discard, and what video goes in each (small) project. Use the timecode of your camera to log the location(s) in your index. (If you're using iMovie to view the video in the camera, you might want to take screen captures.)
When you are done making the index, you are ready to build the Halloween project. Import the Halloween chunks from all the tapes to a Halloween project, edit it, and burn it to a DVD, export it back to a new "Halloween" camcorder tape, or do whatever you want with it.
Don't miss that if you import all the Halloween clips to a project, you can export that project back to a new tape in the camcorder. The clips will (usually) retain their clip-ness, so when you re-import that tape to a project the clips will come back as discrete clips. Tapes can be useful place to store clips temporarily, or as permanent vault organized by topic.
Good luck with your project. It'll be fun, but it's going to take a while. Relax, take your time, and enjoy it.
Karl