How i reduced by 10 times the size of imovie Thumbnails

Question

hi,
as you may know imovie produces huge movie thumbnails file that appears to be encoded in this format:
Apple Photo - JPEG, 160 x 90, Millions
16-bit Integer (Big Endian), Stereo, 48.000 kHz
it's there just to allow the timeframe to be animated while hoovering it with the cursor which is a MAJOR feature of imovie that I LOVE!!!!
*original movie:*
apple-getamac-chooseavista_848x496.mov
H.264 Decoder, 848 x 480, Millions
AAC, Stereo (L R), 44.100 kHz
25FPS
2.9Mo
Thumbnail movie:
Apple Photo - JPEG, 160 x 90, Millions
16-bit Integer (Big Endian), Stereo, 48.000 kHz
25 FPS
8.3Mo (Bigger than the original !!!! )
RE ENCODED Thumbnail Movie:
AAC, Stereo (L R), 16.000 kHz
Apple Photo - JPEG, 160 x 90, Millions
5 FPS
852KB
With the newly encoded thumbnail imovie reacts the same way and the movie editing is just AS GOOD AND EASY.
Hope it helps to make imovie better

Answer 1

As far as I can see it takes up exactly the same amount of size, it's just stored in the library instead of in the project. Am I missing something - or is that what you mean?
Even when we include both the Event Library and the Project Library, the size of an iMovie 7 project is considerably smaller than earlier versions of iMovie. That is because iMovie 7 doesn't convert the source material to DV, which occurred with most pre-7 projects. H.264 video we import, for example, no longer swells to many times its original size. That saves us a lot of disk space. (I just imported a 12MB H.264 movie — a Large movie exported from iM7 — to iMovie 6. It swelled into a 120MB DV clip. When I import the same movie to iMovie 7 the project and Event combined, including Thumbnails, is 15MB.)
There's one other potential saving. It's now possible to discard Event material while retaining only those part(s) of the Event the project actually uses. That wasn't possible in iMovie 5 or 6. In 5/6, a source clip was never discarded if a project clip used ANY PORTION of the source material. If we used 5 seconds of a 30-minute clip the project retained the whole 30 minutes when we emptied the Trash. That's no longer true. In iM7, if we want to keep 5 seconds we can discard the rest. (I haven't tested that feature yet, but that's what the Space Saver dialog says. For more details search for "space saver" in iMovie Help.)
There's one other advantage to iMovie 7. We can store Events on other disks away from the project. For laptops and iMacs — which can use just one internal drive — that lets us store Events on inexpensive external disks. Yes, we could store entire projects on external drives in earlier versions, but iMovie 7 lets us keep our projects in one place, in the Movies folder of our startup drive, while storing Events somewhere else. I use three drives to store Events; I assume I could use many more drives if needed.
So we will use a lot less disk space for iMovie 7 than we ever did in earlier versions. In that context, I'm not worried about the few MB used for the Thumbnail movies. Nor am I willing to run the risk of messing up a project by fiddling with material iMovie owns. Down that road lies disaster. When we discard Event material, for example, what happens to the thumbnail we substituted? Will it cause problems for iMovie when it tries to modify our thumbnail movie that has a different frame rate? Will iMovie simply discard our thumbnail movie and build a new one? Has anyone tested this? Does anyone know? What happens we we add new material to an Event?
Others may be willing to take such risks, but when considering the whole iMovie 7 space-saving environment, I don't think the risks are worth it. iMovie 7 is such a space saver I'm not going to worry about the thumbnails.
Karl