Re: Trying to spilt up a imported movie to export to several disc.

Question

Okay I've managed to import a old home movies into i Movie 6 and have a large movie 33gigs i've been able break down the film into smaller segments ( I thought) the last 3 clips are all the same size ( 5.33gigs) even though they are only 4 min in duration. I'm i missing something ?
I started importing several 10 min clips and spliting the clips and creating a new movie. All was well until i thought to import the last 30 min and then Split up the time line. into smaller clips. the new clips are still to large to copy to a dvd as a data file
Thank you for any help

Answer 1

Splitting a clip into two parts does not split its source file. The source file — which iMovie creates when you import the video from the camera — always remains the same length, normally the length of the scene you shot.
When you split a clip in two, iMovie simply adjusts the two clips' pointers to the source file. The first clip might point to frame 1 of the file, for example, while the second clip might point to a frame somewhere in the middle of the file.
When iMovie displays the size of a clip, it shows you the size of its source file, not the size of the clip. So your 5.5GB file is probably about 25 minutes long.
There is no way to make a source file smaller; iMovie's non-destructive editing feature makes that impossible, for it always let us restore a clip to the original length. To do that, iMovie must preserve the file intact. That lets us recover a clip if we screw up.
One solution for the file-is-too-big-to-burn-a-DVD woes is to export each part of your split clip to its own Full Quality movie. Select the clip, then in the export dialog check the box "Share selected clips only". You can import that file back into the iMovie project if you like, or simply burn it to a DVD if that serves your purpose.
Note that iMovie 6 has a feature that lets us bypass this whole problem. Instead of importing very long scenes — i.e. with large files — use iMovie preferences to limit the length of a scenes to three minutes or the duration you prefer. The project has more clips, but each has its own (much smaller) file. That means you can discard those clips to recover that disk space, or burn them to a DVD.
Karl