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Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Rick Churchill
I knew when I bought the Macbook that 256GByte SSD storage would be limiting as I was use to 1TByte but I couldn’t justify the price for the maximum 512GByte model. I moved off all my pictures and video on to a removable drive but when editing video I ran out of storage when I started rendering the video. The problem is that iMovie copies back the media to be used in editing into a library stored where the application resides i.e. the main computer.

(I have Adobe Premier Elements which allows you to move cache files and the library off onto a separate drive but I have a software glitch which I cannot solve without replacing a file and as I haven’t been able to use my external DVD drive I cannot get to the file on the Adobe DVD)

1. How do other members edit their videos?
2. I am moving my music files (about 80GBytes) but I seem to remember last time I did this I encountered a problem with using music in another app but I can’t remember what it was.
3. Am I right that I cannot make one flash drive with the video on it to take round to friends to show on their PCs or Macs (the video being well over 4GByte) with the Mac, as Macs cannot write NTFS and PCs cannot read OS ext. I could transfer it to a PC via an external drive then write it to a flash drive formatted to NTFS which both PCs and Macs can read.
(Sorry I cannot attend on Tuesday)

Re: Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Tony Still
Hi Rick,

1. How about copying iMove to your external drive and opening it from there? It may well then use that drive for working storage too. Make sure that your iMovie library is on that drive too (you can create a new iMovie library from within the app - I feel that a library per project is a useful arrangement but I suppose it depends what movies you produce).

2. There's an Apple Support page on m moving your iTunes library. I have referenced it here quite recently but Google should find it.

3. Flash drives can go much bigger than 4GB. I have just bought a 64GB for £20 from Amazon because - gasp- it has a USB-C connector! The bigger drives use the ExFAT format that both macOS and Windows understand.

Re: Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Rick Churchill
1) That's a good idea.
2) Yes have moved my iTunes library successfully. I think the snag is that I have to make sure the external drive is connected if I want to charge my phone from the Mac as it starts iTunes which then looks for a non-existing library and will create a new one on the Mac.
3) You misunderstand, (I think). The drive I have is 32GByte but the maximum file size that can be written in FAT32 is 4GByte, a lot less than my video file which can only be written (I think) in NTFS or OS extended.
(I have found a work around by sending the file over my wifi network between Mac and PC. I haven't yet written the file to an NTFS flash drive.)

Re: Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Tony Still
Rick,

I did misunderstand, thought your concern was drive size. However, ExFAT is not FAT32 and will take files bigger than 4GB (an internal 32-bit limit) so the suggestion is still valid.

According to Wikipedia, the ExFAT max file size is stupidly large (presumably 64-bits). I don't have a large file to hand to test it.

Re: Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Rick Churchill
Thanks Tony, I keep making bad assumptions. I ignored this format because I read it as an old form of FAT not an EXtended form and therefore later version. A little knowledge.....
(64Gbytes?)
I'll use this format in future.

Re: Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Tony Still
Held in a 64-bit value (so possibly up to 9223372036854775807 bytes - I did say "stupidly large").

Re: Moving iMovie Library

Avatar Rick Churchill
I should have known you wouldn't make a mistake with bits and bytes
 
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