Starting a Project

iMovie keeps you informed of how much hard drive space you have left.

To start a project in iMovie, pull down the File menu to New Project... and tell iMovie where you want to put your files and the name you want to use. Be careful here. Digital video uses up a lot of hard drive space. Make sure you have enough space. A minute of digital video footage is typically going to use up about 220 megabytes of space. iMovie offers an indicator below the shelf window so you can monitor your available space on your hard drive. But be prepared to work selectively if your system is already crammed full of games, applications, and documents.

It is also important to make sure that you are saving your project to a reasonably fast hard drive. The built-in hard drive on your iMac will usually handle the data requirements just fine. Be careful, however, of trying to work off of external storage disks or drives.

The iMovie file and the Media directory are within your project folder and need to stay together if you copy your files.

Once you have given a location and name to your project, iMovie will create a folder with that name. Inside that folder will be an iMovie file with that same project name and a folder called Media. The iMovie file is what professionals would refer to as an edit decision list (or EDL for short). It carries nothing more than a set of instructions for how iMovie is supposed to put your video together. The pieces of your video actually sit in the Media folder.

So the important lesson here is that if you wish to copy your project to a backup disk or another location, make sure you move the outer project folder (on the left in the screen shot above) and not the inner project file. Keep everything together so iMovie will know where to find it. An iMovie project file without the accompanying media files is absolutely useless.