Trimming Clips in Quicktime and importing to iMovie

Question

Level 1

23 points

Trimming Clips in Quicktime and importing to iMovie

So I've got a ton of my daughter's soccer games and I want to trim out her plays from the QuickTime movies and import them to iMovie. Yes, I know I could just import them to iMovie, but honestly, I can't spare the hard disk space for all of them.

Is there a way to trim a clip in QuickTime and then import (copy/paste) them into iMovie where I could then adjust/trim them?

I see how to trim clips, but I don't see how to paste them.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Mar 16, 2022 9:07 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Mar 17, 2022 6:39 PM in response to Lloyd Stein1

Yes, you can keep all of your movie files off of your internal drive, as explained below.

In iMovie 10 a full sized duplicate of your the movie imported into iMovie will reside in the Original Media folder located in the iMovie library. The original media folder is a Finder folder that resides on whatever drive in which the iMovie library is located. In addition, the full sized original source file will reside in whatever location and drive that you have stored them in. So, you will have two full sized files, one in iMovie and one in your source file location. If you put your iMovie library in an external drive the media in the library will reside in that drive, instead of on your internal hard drive. You can place the original source files on the external drive as well. In that case none of the media files will reside in your internal drive and they won't be taking up any space there.

If you put your iMovie library on an external drive, the drive must first be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS.

-- Rich

Reply

Answer 2

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Mar 16, 2022 9:45 PM in response to Lloyd Stein1

After you trim the clip in QuickTimePlayer export the trimmed clip to your desktop and from there drag it into an iMovie project timeline..

— Rich

Reply

Answer 3

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Mar 17, 2022 9:40 AM in response to Lloyd Stein1

Right. You just want to export the trimmed movie out of QuickTimePlayer. Would be safe to keep an untrimmed original so that you can make changes if need be.

-- Rich

Reply

Answer 4

Lloyd Stein1 Author

Level 1

23 points

Mar 17, 2022 5:17 PM in response to Rich839

Okay, sorry to bother you one more time. So I'm going through and trimming clips and saving them to my external drive, it works, but saving the clips is excruciatingly slow. Not sure if it's my computer being a little older or the external drive or it just saves slowly, but I have a sense it would be faster to make the clip reel if I did it in iMovie.

Here's the question. Can I do it in iMovie, but keep all the movies and save all the clips on an external drive so I'm not adding to a hard drive that is nearly full (new computer on the way).

Thanks.

Reply