Basic questions from new iMac user

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halitri

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Just bought a new 20" iMac this weekend. Been a PC as well as Unix user for the last 16 years. Now I'm struggling with some of the basic interface differences. I'll throw some starter questions I have from playing around this weekend out. Appreciate any help.

1. How do I get at the underlying files iMovie imported so I can save them on a data DVD? I don't want to save everything to the hard drive, or even an external hard drive due to the number of miniDV tapes I have. I also don;t want to wait to import the video every time I want to access it. I'm guessing iMovie stores the individual clips it imports as individual movie files (.mov's maybe?) somewhere on the hard drive, but that all seems to be hidden from me. I'd like to have some data DVD's with all the original uncompressed video that I could bring into iMovie whenever I wanted without waiting to read it from the camcorder in real time.
2. If I have files like .mov files (or whatever we find the originals were) on a data DVD, how do I bring those clips into a new Movie project.
3. How do I determine how big my iMovie project is? I see it by name in the Movies folder but the size column shows "---".
4. How do I get the finder window to show file extensions. Right now I see "My Great Movie" but I'm guessing it has a file extension that I'm not seeing. Sort of like the preferences in Windows explorer.
5. Any idea how to get to a Unix shell (command prompt)?
6. How do I share a folder between users. I'd like my iPhoto and iMovie stuff to be shared between my account and my wife's account.
7. How do I see what the hard drive really looks like? For example, on my PC I can go to Documents and Settings and see all users, their "My Documents", etc. On the Mac, I'm only seeing things in my account. The Finder appears to hide all the "complication" from me.

I'm sure I'll have more questions, but this would be a great starter.
 
The iMovie project files are actually folders, merely presented as files by the Finder (and handled as files by iMovie). You can bring up the contextual menu on such a package in the Finder by using the right mouse button or hitting Ctrl while clicking on the file and choose "Show package contents". In there, you should find the clips. They should be in .dv format IIRC.
 
Question 3.
In the finder window, Select "Show View Options" (#1) then select "Calculate All Sizes" (#2).
 

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Also, you could select the file in the Finder and hit Cmd-"i" (Get Info). Activating the Calculate All Sizes can be a resource hog.
 
And in the same Get Info window, you will find the option for showing or hiding extensions. Question 4.
 
Related to 5, Terminal is by default a bash shell on newer versions of OS X (10.3 and above) and works pretty much as you would expect, all the basics will be familiar.

If you are linux happy you might want to check out fink and darwinports which bring various linux packages to OSX.
 
Thanks to all for the quick replies.

Is there a way to turn on the "show file extensions" permanantly. I see where I can show the extension on a file by file basis, but that gets old pretty quick. I guess this is the Windows side of me wanting to see this as I'm used to it.

I also see the contents of the iMovie project thanks to the earlier reply. Is there a way to know when looking at something in Finder whether it is a file or a package/folder containing other items? In this case the iMovie project did not have a folder icon so I thought it was a file, but really appears to be a folder disguised as a file.

Still would like to know how to share the photos and movies between user accounts on the same machine too.

Again, thanks for all the help.
 
halitri said:
Thanks to all for the quick replies.

Is there a way to turn on the "show file extensions" permanantly. I see where I can show the extension on a file by file basis, but that gets old pretty quick. I guess this is the Windows side of me wanting to see this as I'm used to it.
Click to expand...

In the finder go to finder>preferences. Click Advanced and check "Show all file extensions. Enjoy!
 
The reverse of what I posted above, go uncheck "show all file extensions" should do you, though maybe some will still show up.
 
Got this from Finder's Mac Help. I'm not knowledgeable about Mac OS X so somebody please correct me if I posted a wrong answer to halitri's question.

6. The Shared and Public folders let you share files with other people.

The Shared folder is located in the Users folder on your hard disk. You can use it to share files with other users on your computer. The Shared folder is set up with Read & Write permissions so that all users can open the files in this folder and copy files to the folder.

Save or move your files to the Shared Folder.
 
1. The files will fill a massive amount of space. You'll end up with a truck load of discs. I use an external Firewire 500GB drive for holding my current movie files. These drives are becoming cheaper by the week.
 
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