I was using my macbook air 2013 to create a youtube video on iMovie. When I started I had 55gb of space left. I recorded everything used handbrake to convert it and edited it in iMovie. I then exported it and put it on youtube. I then deleted absolutely every file from iMovie and the event. But my remaining space had gone from 55gb to 44gb. What is taking up this space?
MacBook – iMovie hard drive space
imoviemacbook pro
Related Solutions
From iMovie, go to Share-> Export Using QuickTime. Set the Export: menu is set to Movie to MPEG-4. Click the Options... button next to that menu.
Set the File Format to MP4
Set the Video Format to H.264
Set the Data Rate to something like 2048
Set the Image Size to 1080
Click OK
Click Save
That should give you a much better-quality video.
Hope this helps!
Since iMovie doesn't have a setting to set a folder inside the drive and stores things at the root of an external drive, you can use folders to segregate projects quite nicely.
When you open iMovie, just right click on the name of the external drive and make a new folder. Make a second folder and name them for each of you. When you open iMovie, you can collapse her folder and vice versa to avoid having to see all of the projects for the non-active user.
You could also make disk images on the drive and store them anywhere, but that is a bit more tedious for little additional payoff. You would avoid having two folders made at the root of the drive, but at the expense of a more complicated storage layer. The down side is you still have folders at the root of the external drive as well as all the project footage is in subfolders rather than in their own folder.
The remedy for this is to create sparse disk images for each set of projects and mount them before moving content to each "disk". The iMovie visual will be as if you have two drives additional drives even though they are just files/folders on the same drive.
The only warning I have is when you have multiple clips referencing the same footage - avoid moving one and not the other. Moving all the projects to the external would be extremely robust and workable, but iMovie can be a little too aggressive in moving footage to a new drive without checking to see if other projects left behind reference that footage. Luckily, things re-link nicely once you discover the missing footage error and reunite the "left behind" project with it's partner and footage.
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Best Answer
Try looking at your cache. Navigate to
~/Library/Caches/and look for a folder for iMovie (may also be labeled com.apple.iMovie). Check its size. If it's quite large, then you've found the culprit.Note: deleting the contents of
Cachesis safe provided the application isn't running. While not necessary, deleting the contents of the entire folder should prompt a reboot.You may also elect to give Grand Perspective a try, which will show you the contents of your drive and how files are arranged on it. This will help hunt down the loss of space you are experiencing.