Moving files to external drive not creating hard disk space

My 500gb iMac (purchased April 2010) is about at capacity. 350gb of space is taken up by home movies (.dv files) in iMovie. I bought an external hard drive and have moved most of those videos over to the new drive.

After transfer, I deleted the original Events off iMovie and emptied the trash. I checked in both iMovie and in Finder and no longer see those files present on the Mac.

I thought this was going smooth and everything worked perfectly, but….when i went to check how much storage space i created on the Mac hard drive, the amount of available space barely budged (i moved 200gb of data to the new drive and yet i only created about 30gb of space on the Mac).

Any advice on what i did wrong? Are these "deleted" files hidden somewhere and I need to go delete from somewhere else? How do I make sure I get back the storage that i need?

Thanks for the help.

Did you empty the trash in Finder or iMovie? iMovie has it's own trash that needs to be deleted. Look in the menus.

Thanks!....you helped me figure out where i went off base.