iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Space Saver

Now you know how to permanently vaporize all the footage you've flagged as useless. But as it turns out, iMovie offers an additional tool for reclaiming hard drive space—a little something called Space Saver.

It's a little complicated, thanks to the double-negative wording of its options ("Reject if a clip is not this"), but here goes:

Space Saver's function is to mark all unused, unfavorited, or unkeyworded video in an Event as rejects, all in one fell swoop. That way, you can use the previous steps to empty your Rejected Clips window and get a lot of hard drive space back.

The most useful application of this powerful command is to purge your Event of leftover footage after you're really, truly finished editing a project. Space Saver can help you throw away all of the imported video that didn't wind up being used in the project. In essence, you're locking down your project in its current form, removing any chance of expanding the clips you've used in it—but you're getting a lot of hard drive space back.

Note

If you have a tape camcorder, and you still have the original tape, this is a no-lose, no-risk proposition. If you're ever desperate to re-edit your movie years from now, you can always reimport the original clips from the tape. In the meantime, you're not filling up your hard drive with a lot of video deadwood.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Deleting Partial Clips: The Mixed Blessing

iMovie '09's ability to delete pieces of clips from your hard drive certainly seems, at first glance, like a refreshing change from previous versions of iMovie.

In iMovie 5 and 6, you'd reclaim hard drive space only if you deleted an entire clip. If you'd incorporated even one second of a clip into your project, iMovie retained the entire clip on your hard drive, even if it was many minutes (and megabytes) long. As a result, even short iMovie projects could occupy many gigabytes of disk space.

Apple's justification for this behavior was, "Well, you might want to change your mind. You might want to re-edit this movie later and use more of that clip in your project." And that was true; it's frequently convenient to tinker with your edit by dragging the outer edges of already-placed clips to bring more of those shots into view. That trick's possible only if you haven't deleted the hidden part of a clip.

All of this history is printed here for one purpose: To remind you that partial-clip deletion is a mixed blessing. iMovie '09 can save you an enormous amount of hard drive space if you diligently reject, and then delete, the footage that you're certain you'll never want anyone to see.

But keep in mind that when you do that, you lose the flexibility to change your mind.

To get started, choose File → Space Saver. The dialog box shown in Figure 4-7 appears. It's offering to mark everything as a reject unless it's:

• Part of a project. This is the example described in the box "Deleting Partial Clips: The Mixed Blessing." Turn on "Not added to any project" if you want to get rid of all video clips in this Event that you haven't used in any movie project.

• One of your favorites. If you've been using the Favorites feature religiously, and have marked all usable video as Favorite, then you can turn on "Not marked as Favorite". Anything you did not mark as a favorite now becomes a reject. (Pretty harsh!) The only footage left in this Event will be your favorites.

• Categorized with a keyword. This option is for people who categorize everything useful with one keyword or another, as described on Keywords. Turning on "Not marked with a keyword" marks everything else as a reject, and puts it on the road to deletion.

  There probably aren't very many people who always keyword everything that's useful, which is why the factory setting for this checkbox is off.

Once you've made your selections, click Reject and Review. You arrive in the Rejected Clips window (Figure 4-6, top), where you'll see all the clips that Space Saver has marked for termination.

Figure 4-7. iMovie can save you time and disk space if you let it reject whole categories of clips at a time.

If you're puzzled by what's here and what's not, keep these eccentricities in mind:

• Space Saver marks a clip as a reject only if the entire thing meets the criteria you selected. If part of it is flagged as a favorite, for example, and you've selected "Not marked as Favorite", then no part of the clip will be moved to the Rejected Clips window.

• The checkboxes are cumulative. You can turn on as many of the Space Saver checkboxes as you like. But in keeping with Space Saver's double-negative thinking, turning on more checkboxes rejects fewer clips. That is, if you turn on all three boxes, a clip won't be deleted unless it's unused in a project and not a favorite and doesn't have a keyword. This quirk, too, may explain why some clips don't wind up in the Rejected Clips window when you expected them to.

Once you've skimmed or played the filmstrips in the Rejected Clips window, and you've assured yourself that they're all expendable, you can delete them just as you'd delete any rejected clips. Deleting Footage for Good has the full details, but the gist is this: Click "Move Rejected to Trash", click "Move to Trash" in the confirmation box, and then empty the Macintosh Trash.