# How much space to import 4 hrs of DV for use in iMovie?



## ksignorini (Jan 17, 2003)

Can someone please give me some idea how much space 4 hours of DV (4 one-hour tapes of my sister's wedding) will take up on my hard disk?  And am I looking at double that to have the imported DV and the actual iMovie that I create both sitting on the drive?  That is, does the project contain both the clips and the iMovie itself?

I guess one more question would be, once I have the iMovie together--as a one-hour long movie that I make--how long will iMovie take to create a Quicktime movie from it (just a rough estimate from experience will do...I have a G4 800 MHz eMac with 640MB RAM).

Thanks,
Kent!


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## thomasfxlt (Jan 17, 2003)

About  80 gigs will do it. Maybe a bit less


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## pcouture (Jan 17, 2003)

Does your 800 eMac have a SuperDrive? I'm assuming it doesn't, otherwise you would not be asking about Quicktime, right?

Why do you want to go to Quicktime?
 Is it to burn on Video CD?

This file is gonna be huge. As a matter of fact, it won't fit on Video CD, unless you segment it to burn several disks.

 To get decent quality (reasonable compression), you're looking at 640 X 480 res, at least 22kHz audio and maybe stereo. Even at half that resolution, an hour-long movie would probably fill your disc, but quality won't be goog on a TV set.

You certainly won't want to upload it (how much is that web space/bandwidth gonna cost?) or have people dowload it either, unless again it is segmented, but then the total amount of space , traffic and connection sppeds are still an issue.

My advice: if you don't have a SuperDrive, export your movie back to you DV camcorder, and make good old-fashion VHS copies to distribute to friends and relatives. Even with Video CD, your quality won't be that much better and quite a few of the DVD players out there won't play it. 

Second advice: DO NOT IMPORT ALL THAT FOOTAGE. Make a selection of what you want to keep at the time of importing. It is a little time consuming, but you will save A LOT of hard drive space, and once the import is over, you'll have a lot more fun cutting you movie from GOOD' SOLID shots rather than spending most of your time trimming clips and emptying iMovie's trash. 

Third advice: I don't know how good you are with your camera. I consider myself pretty good, and I would not go from 4 hours of footage to an hour movie. Believe me, the shorter you keep this, the better!!! I would rather have people asking for more after a 30-minute movie that is overfilled with wonderful stuff rather than a bunch of people bored stiff. Be very selective when choosing what makes it into the final movie. This will also allow you to concentrate your efforts on better transitions, more effects (slow motion, stuff like that), more care given to your soundtrack, etc, etc,

Don't forget, nothing is lost. You still have your stock shot on archive tapes. If someone wants to see the whole thing, give'em all the tapes.

My 2 cents worth... Happy editing!


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## Ricky (Jan 17, 2003)

Uncompressed video eats drive space like nobody's business..  You might want to get a bigger drive.


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## jocknerd (Jan 17, 2003)

I just imported an episode of Seinfeld from my video camera. I believe it used about 4 gigs of space.  Thats a lot of space on my iBook with its 20GB hard drive.

I know I only want to work with one project at a time because of this.


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