What to Save to Make Space on Hard Drive

Question

I'm out of space on my internal hard drive and things have come to a crawl. I downloaded the nifty "Disk Inventory X" and it reveals many large files 2-4 GB. Some of them are iDVD files and some are iMovie files. How do I know what to save? If I made a movie, and burned it to iDVD, I still feel like I'd like to keep the original project files incase I need to edit. They don't have to be on the internal but I do want it backed up. What do I save - the Project, the Event, the iDVD? I have a number of Projects and iDVD files that just say "New Project1" or New Project. I must never have named them and yet they are huge files. What can I delete and what should I backup? Craig

Answer 1

Well, only you can decide what projects you want/need to keep.
You should know that an iDVD project is really a 'shell' that references to the media used within it, but does not contain that media. So, if you move, change, rename or delete an iMovie (or any other media) that you have used in an iDVD project, iDVD will not be able to locate the media and will not open. If you'd like to save your iDVD project intact so that you could burn a DVD disk in the future, you should open the iDVD project and select 'Save as Disk image' from the File menu. This will look like the burn process and the encoding will take just as long, but the end result is a disk image file, not a burned DVD disk. This disk image file is an exact replica of your iDVD project. It is self-contained, meaning that all the media information is contained in the disk image file. Now you can just save it and delete the original iDVD project. If you are not going to need the iMovie used in it, you can delete it as well. Because a disk image file is usually much smaller than the iMovie and iDVD project, you can save considerable drive space.
So open those iDVD projects 'New Project' and 'New Project1' and see what they are and if you really want/need to keep them. If they turn out to be important, you can rename them by doing a 'Save as' and then delete the ones named new project. You can then create disk image files and delete the iDVD projects.
For the movies, keeping all the original footage and the edited footage may be optimal for you if you anticipate further editing, but it does take up lots of space. You can move files to an external drive, but you need to do it properly.
With iMovie 6, it is easy to save....you just copy the movie to an external drive and keep it there, deleting the one on your main drive.
With iMovie 8, you need to be sure you are keeping all the necessary files together and moving the right ones.
Here are some links to discussions about that:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9409149&#9409149
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9421416&#9421416
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9519028&#9519028
Post back if this does not help.