welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today's video
i wanted to discuss where your videos actually live with an imovie so let's do it
for imovie whenever you're dealing with videos
videos take up a tremendous amount of space and they can take up space over time because of
something called render files and we'll get more into rendering and what those files are later but
essentially when you have video clips you're importing them into events within imovie and those
events are stored in what are called libraries so imovie has these giant libraries that can hold
a lot of different events and your events hold your video clips and those video clips are
copied from your camera memory card whatever it may be and they're stored in these libraries on
the computer here before i even open up imovie if i go to the finder and i go to the movies folder
this is where the default location of your imovie library is and you probably have one called
imovie library and for me i actually have a couple different libraries because i like to organize my
video clips based upon what i'm doing and having multiple libraries is actually really really
helpful and i'll show you why in a second here but this is where your videos actually live now if i
double click on this imovie library it's actually going to open up imovie and bring me right into
where all of this video footage is so notice on the left here i have this imovie library and it
consists of three different events computer b-roll green screen and wedding day so inside of here
there's three different events that all contain a whole bunch of video clips or pictures and they're
all stored in this one entire library now the reason that it's important to understand where
this actually lives is over time you're going to fill up the hard drive and you may want to
get an external hard drive like what i have here uh which by the way these little sandisks here
amazing seriously if you're looking for a hard drive i'll i'll i'll leave a link below down in
the bottom but these sandisks who so tiny i mean look how tiny this is uh like look
i don't know if you can see it's focusing on my face but uh here it is like it's it's seriously
the size of my thumb like tall wise but these are really really awesome they're solid state they are
are they pricey well they've come a long way they're they're very very affordable a couple
hundred dollars well worth the investment but the size alone is fantastic but long story short
videos always take up a huge amount of space and often your computer is going to fill up
and if you needed to save space on your computer you would get an external hard drive so you can
move your video footage over to that external hard drive and then anytime you're editing your video
you would need this external hard drive plugged in so it's very common for that to happen a lot
of people have and work off an external hard drive especially when it comes to videos but knowing how
imovie stores your videos is really important so that you can do that next step i'm going to go
ahead back to the finder and i'm going to open up these other libraries and kind of go through
why i have actually multiple libraries because by default most people have only one library and they
put a whole bunch of events in there and then over time you have multiple multiple multiple events
and the imovie organization could use improvement i'll just say that and i have another video that
i'll link at the end or down here in the description about organizing clips inside
of imovie but just know that having multiple libraries is another successful way to help you
organize your videos so for me i have a vacations imovie library here on the left i have an arizona
library and i have an imovie library now for me i split them up based off of kind of what i'm doing
and there's no right or wrong answer here it's it's purely how you want to organize your videos
so for me i created a whole library dedicated to arizona because this was actually a promotional
project i was working on so it's nothing like for me personally so i wanted to kind of isolate it
from all of my personal life and my vacations things like that because i wanted to quickly
be able to move this whole library onto an external or someplace else without organizing it
along with my personal life so this whole entire library is all self-contained inside of this one
event and i can easily find it and give it to someone uh for that project now the one above it
is my imovie vacations library and this is just an example so here i have three different events this
is my california trip trip up north shore and some fun clips in the pool so we can look at all the
video footage here but the library itself is more of a generalized vacation library and then you
could create all of your events based off of the vacation so maybe we have a vacation to florida
to minnesota to chicago to minneapolis and you can create multiple events within that one library
now if you wanted a new library i could go up to the file and choose open library and then
i can say new and let's say i wanted to create a library and call it 2021 and then choose save so
now i've created a library based off of the year and then underneath that i could keep it keep the
events based off of the dates that the video was taken or maybe this is someone's birthday party
i could create another event inside of here and say this is vacation vacation to i don't know why
i have denmark in my in my brain or i could create another event and say you know wedding whatever it
may be so your videos are always in events and your events are always inside libraries these
events can be created either prior to importing or while you're importing but the main key is knowing
where your video footage actually lies now when i created this new library inside of imovie if i go
back to the finder i'm actually going to have this brand new 2021 library here in my finder
so this is where the videos actually live they're all stored in here
now let's say that you do need to free up space and so i want to move this to my external hard
drive so if i plug in my external hard drive to my computer i'm going to quit out of imovie first
so i'm going to go up to imovie choose quit imovie and then i'm going to move this over a little bit
and notice down here on the the bottom so this is my external hard drive notice coffee cup
coffee cup oh and look so i have a really cool artist friend his name is also joel we worked
at apple together we had this thing called two joel's one goal i know it sounds really corny
but uh we like to create like challenges for the employees this was like way back in the day but
really cool guy awesome artist he drew this for me and for my birthday and so we put it on a cup
all right i digress i like coffee and joel's good guy so back to the external hard drive so here's
my external hard drive and i want to free up space again that's the whole purpose of moving um imovie
library to an external hard drive is to free up space so if i took this finder window and i went
to 2021 i can just drag this over to the external hard drive and it's going to copy it from the
computer to this external hard drive i'm going to drag arizona over here also and it's going to copy
that video footage and it's going to take a couple minutes based off of how much video footage you
have but once it's done i'm able to go back to the actual computer delete it because then that video
footage is on my external hard drive here as this arizona library copies to my external hard drive
i want to show you a few more things that are more kind of advanced that i wouldn't recommend
that you do unless you really have a need to do it and this just really dives further into where
your video files actually are at so before i said all of your videos are stored inside the libraries
and those libraries contain events and that whole library is almost like a whole entire package and
that's how i'm able to move this arizona library to my external hard drive because it contains
everything to do with that whole entire library all the video clips all the events all of the
projects now if i take my imovie vacations library that's on my computer if i right click on this i
have this option to do show package contents now if i click on this and expand this actually shows
me the california event north shore pool fun and then the project one of the movie trailers that i
have in here and if i unfold one of these folders notice original media render files shared items
this is actually where imovie organizes everything for us behind the scenes so you don't want to move
any files this is not something where you want to go and do this because you could potentially
screw up all of your projects and all of that my purpose of showing you this is so that you really
understand how imovie actually organizes all of your videos behind the scenes because it's trying
to do it for a convenience for all of your stuff where you can just focus on picking out the good
video and creating the projects that you want to create so this is actually where those videos are
behind the scenes so i'm just going to close out of this window so now the copying of the external
is done so i have my arizona on my external drive here so if i went back to my movies folder
if i deleted this library we're going to drag this to the trash if i go back to my external
hard drive and i double click on arizona library it's now going to open up that library from my
external hard drive so all my videos all my clips are inside of this on this hard drive
so i could take this plug it into a different mac different apple computer and i'm able to
pick up right where i left off it also gives me the ability to obviously free up the space
physically on my computer and it's all on this external hard drive now if i don't want it on this
external hard drive i just reverse the process i can take this arizona library drag it back to the
movies folder on my mac and now it's just going to copy that whole entire container and bring it
back to my computer you're just moving these files around and a library is really just the container
that holds everything one last thing as we do this we talked about render files render files are when
you create a project and you're adding text and you're adding audio effects and video effects
if your computer is not fast enough it needs to render the video so that it's able to show it
to you in real time if you've ever been working on a computer and the video is kind of choppy
and it kind of stutters a little bit it's usually because your computer is trying to keep up with
you because you're so advanced with all of your video editing so it's trying to keep up with you
and it can't do it so it needs to render that video out and it creates these special render
files so that it can give you better playback of your video files and those files go someplace and
they take up a lot of space over time so that's where if that ever happens to you if i open up
imovie i'll go back to my vacations library here i can go to imovie and choose preferences and that's
where you have this option that says delete render files and it even says delete render files will
free up storage space so if i click on this it's saying hey are you sure you want to delete these
yep i do i'll click on delete and now it's going to go through the back end and delete those render
files and free up some additional storage for me it could be a couple gigabytes it could be
a couple hundred gigabytes it all depends on how often you delete the render files and how often
your computer renders your videos so just know that there's a couple different techniques to
free up space one is to delete these render files but another is to move these video libraries or
these imovie libraries to an external hard drive and if we want to know where those render files
live again we would right click on this library go to show package contents and underneath each event
they actually have these render files in here a folder there so this is actually where they
live so do not delete anything from these folders again that's don't don't do that i just want you
to understand where these files actually live so that's pretty much uh imovie file management
in a nutshell movies clips they're copied from an external hard drive a movie camera phone ipad
whatever it may be they're copied into events those events are stored inside of libraries it's
a giant container and those libraries can be moved wherever you want so i hope you learned something
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you