DV in iMovie

Hi guys, I'm trying to digitalize all family movies, so I connected my DV camera to my mac and started importing to iMovie 09. The things is I noticed that's it's eating a lot of space... what i basically want is to have all my old movies on my mac and organized by dates and events like in iMovie

should I convert from dv to mp4 or mov in order to save space? would it still be organized in my events?

thanx for the help

Dv format is going to chew a lot of drive space. Others with more experience with this will chime in but here is my two cents. Edit the files in DV format then save the final version in something smaller like .mp4,

I converted all the files to mp4 and imported back to iMovie, but iMovie converts it to MOV that also takes a lot of gigs...any help plzzz

Based on this Apple discussion thread I wouldn't even use iMovie 09 (or 08) to import DV material. I haven't tried it, but this hack might be useful for the problem. Using an alternate import tool such as an older version of iMovie HD maybe a better solution.

One hour of standard definition video takes about 13GB of disk space. If you want to keep the quality at its best, you don't want to convert. Conversions do change things and since most are lossy, you lose quality. If you insist, then try H.264 in a QuickTime container. Experiment with short samples.

Using iMovie HD would help me saving space in the hard disk?
I'ven't seen any problem regarding quality.

t4ggs said:

Using iMovie HD would help me saving space in the hard disk?

Click to expand...

No. Video, regardless of codec used, takes up a lot of disk space.