"Movies" taking up too much HDD space

Hi all. Trying to dig into issues with my lack of HDD space on my MBA.

I decided a good place to start would be to address the 30 gigs worth of Movies which System Information is claiming I'm using. I am only aware of 6 gigs worth of Movies, 2 gigs from iTunes, and 4 gigs which I transferred from a PC. I have used an app called Disk Inspector which is great at visualizing what is taking up space on my Mac but it isn't showing me how there would be 25gigs of unaccounted for Movies on my Mac. Is there another program I should be using which could pinpoint the file types which System Information is labeling as "Movies"? Any help would be appreciated!

Give this a whirl!

Disk Inventory X

try to use another Nektony app Disk expert, i just installed several their apps, they are great

Do you do a lot with iMovie? If you do I'm going to try and share something I found. I still consider myself a Mac newb, but I'll do my best.

What I have found about iMovie, is that it keeps several copies of the same movie within the system. I'll give you a good example. Each week, I create about a 10 minute video for our announcements at church. When I do that, I have a project setting there called "Announcements 10-3-12" for example. Once I export it to a QuickTime video, I right click on the movie and move project to trash.

However, even though it shows going to the trash, there are still a lot of remnants of it still within the iMovie app.

So in order to find them I go into Finder, choose my main username, then I go under "Movies". From there I go into the iMovie folders. They have events, projects, etc. If I drill down into those folders I see there are cache and thumbnail folders as well and I've found QuickTime movies that have my "Announcements" name in there in multiple places. And I'm talking actual full on movies. Not just a thumbnail pic.

In any case, I went through and deleted several months worth of those (I hadn't seen them there before, but I noticed a lot of disk space being taken up quickly too), I literally freed up probably 30gb's of space on my system.

There might be some more Mac tech savvy guys in here that can better explain what I just shared, but I did want to share my experience with you just in case it might help.

Take care,

Steve

While DiskInventoryX is another nice visualizer, for me it takes too much work to see all your stuff and where it is. If you really would like to see what and where everything is on your drive, I recommend WhatSize.

You can also do a search in Finder without a 3rd party app and look at the location of the returned files.