No Disk space on my BRAND NEW MacBookPro???

Question

While using my Imovie to import clips from my Canon ZR600 First 38 edited clips suddenly moved into the Trash on their own.. and cannot be dragged out without them flying back like on a rubber band.. Now I get this error message that says,"You are running Dangerously low on Disk Space.. If you continue you may not be able to save your project..(which I have already saved I thought), You should immediately delete unused clips from the Trash, or switch to the Finder to delete other files in order to make more space available.." But for crying out loud I haven't even owned this high capacity memory machine more than a few days.. how can this be?? Another error message says I should empty my Trash to acquire more disk space... but I WANT to Restore them.. not delete them.. Very frustrating.. Any help?? Please Advice Thanks Much. I hate to say it, but I NEVER had this kind of problems with my previous 8 Windows machines that didn't have a simple solution.. I hope this problem does as well, or I'm going to be seriously in doubt about the superiority of Apple.. especially given the problems I'm observing that others are having on this board.. TELL ME I'M WRONG..

Answer 1

Hi,
You don't say how long those "..38 edited clips.." are.
Digital Video uses about 13GB of space per hour of video. If you've imported, say, 3 hrs of video, that'd take up nearly 40 GB of hard disc space. On an 80 GB hard disc, that'd be a tight squeeze, taking into account your Operating System, whatever programs and documents you may have - especially if you've loaded it up with pictures and iTunes!
And the Mac OS likes to have about 10% of the hard disc as free space, for swapping items in and out of memory, keeping 'log' files of what it's doing, etc.
If you're going to import and edit lots of video, do what many people do: get a fast external FireWire hard disc to use exclusively for movies, format it as Mac OS Extended (aka HFS+) as soon as you first plug it in - using Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility and clicking the 'Erase tab' - and then you should have trouble-free editing ..oh!.. just thought: Canons don't like to share the FireWire connection with anything else, so you may not be able to 'daisy-chain' your Canon camcorder through the FireWire disc to your MacBook ..in which case, import video to the MacBook, and movie it across to the FW disc.
But first: how long were those 38 clips..?