Clip size help please.

Question

I have loaded a 12GB file into Imovie from my DV camera.
I now want to split the file into a number of clips that will be the right size for burning to disk.
To test, I took a 3 minute clip from the original 60 minute (12GB) file but it's size remains at 12GB.
How do I get the 3 minute clip to reflect the size that it should be?

Answer 1

There are two different things to take into consideration here:
1. "..I took a 3 minute clip from the original 60 minute (12GB) file but it's size remains at 12GB.."
iMovie HD 6 is a "non-destructive" editor. In the original versions of iMovie, when you cut a clip and discarded the rest then all the unwanted material really was thrown away; so taking a 3 minute clip out of a 60 minute chunk and throwing away the rest left you with a much smaller 650 megabyte mini-clip. But that meant that if you later changed your mind you couldn't 'restore' what you'd thrown away in order to adjust the cut.
In iMovie HD 6 all the original material always remains: when you make a cut, iMovie simply writes a note to itself to tell itself which section(s) of the original material to play, but the whole of the imported DV still sits there in the background, readily available in case you want to make adjustments to your chosen clip(s). That makes it possible to keep on 'Undo'ing mistakes, not just undoing the last cut you made.
So if you trim a 60 minute clip down to 3 mins the whole original 12GB file size still remains.
If hard disc space is tight and you definitely want to discard the original file(s), just Export the clip(s) you've chosen, and that will create a new file which is only as big as the exported material. You can then throw away the original import ..thus cutting your storage space from 12GB to 650MB, for example.
2. "..I now want to split the file into a number of clips that will be the right size for burning to disk.."
If you mean that you want to burn the clips to store them and want to store them on 4.7GB DVDs as data, then the clip sizes will have to be small enough to fit. A 4.7GB DVD will hold roughly 20 minutes worth of DV files.
But if you want to burn a movie DVD of the clips you've chosen ..a DVD which will play in a normal DVD player and show your clips on a TV, then you don't need to worry about file sizes. That's because a movie DVD stores video in a compressed format called MPEG-2, and iDVD will look after the compression so that you can fit almost 2 hours of material onto a video DVD.
(..A 90-minute Hollywood movie easily fits onto a standard 4.7GB DVD because it's compressed ..but only 20 mins of a normal DV file would fit on a 4.7GB DVD..)
So, iDVD will handle all the compression to fit a movie onto a DVD as long as the movie is just under 2 hours long. So don't worry about cutting down file sizes, and don't worry that a 3 minute segment of a 1 hour DV import still looks like 12GB. You only need to consider "running time" if you're making a movie to put on a DVD. No matter what the apparent file sizes, if your movie runs for 110 minutes then iDVD will unnoticeably compress it so that it'll fit on a 4.7GB DVD.