intuitive my arse

Frikkin iMovie.

Just spent an hour importing all the video from my father-in-law's
camera into iMovie. A third of it Christmas, a third a trip to the Tate
Modern, the London Eye and Aquarium, and a third my daughter's ballet.

Happy Hippy...

I'd have thought it would have been pretty intuitive that you're working
on one movie project, and that when you dump the clips in the trash they
get deleted.

If I record some sound in Audacity (and presumably GarageBand) then I
wouldn't expect it to be there once I've deleted it...

pd.news...

In iTunes, when I delete a tune from a playlist, it just disappears.
When I delete a tune in the library, which deletes the file off the
disk, I get a warning. I just assumed that I'd get a warning if the clip
files themselves were being deleted, without even being able to retrieve
them from the trash.

Happy Hippy...

But iTunes isn't an editor, it's a media management application.

If I imported a load of pictures into Word or data into Excel from a USB
device (which had since been removed) and then deleted them from the
DOC/XLS file I would no longer expect them to be on the hard disc.

pd.news...

No, but if I placed a whole bunch of pictures in an InDesign document,
then deleted them from that document, I wouldn't expect them to vanish
from the hard disk.

auctions...

In that case you would have 'imported' them from the hard disk, so the
originals stay on the hard disk. In the iMovie case you imported them
from camera and the originals stayed on camera - the behaviour is the
same.

Jaimie Vandenbergh...

But the clips were in a project, and removing things from a project
(which is a set of pointers, really) should not delete them from the
disk. Ask any developer using an IDE.

Cheers - Jaimie

ric...

Is this something that's changed in a recent update to iMovie? I

pd.news...

I'm using a fairly old version - iMovie v3.

remember reading in the Missing Manual that this explicitly didn't
happen - they were warning why you wouldn't reclaim disk space
deleting media clips - and my limited past experience a while back
vaguely confirms this...?

zoara...

You may be thinking of the way that if you imported a three-minute clip
then trimmed off the extraneous guff so you got the useful thirty seconds
in the middle, the clip file would still be the same size. The clip would
not be changed, but iMovie would refer to only a subsection of it. There
was a workaround but I don't remember it.

As my dealings with newer iMovie versions is restricted to undoing the
screwups in the conversion process from an older to newer format, I
couldn't say whether this has changed or not.

Obviously you had different expectations, so perhaps there is an issue

pd.news...

You're right, I did. There is an interface design axiom that a default
action should not destroy data.

I would have been less cavalier about deleting the clips if I'd given
the camera and tapes back, but I really didn't expect them to be deleted
from the disk. Maybe transferred to the trash, but not deleted without
possible recovery.

there. My point was that from the standpoint of it being an editing
application it behaved pretty much as I would expect it to - so it's not
entirely unintuitive.

pd.news...

Perhaps you have a background in film editing or something that would
lead you to expect discarded clips would be destroyed.

A sensible warning, but I think it was the subject line that I took
issue with :-)

pd.news...

It's not my usual style, but born of frustration at the time.

So, eighty clips in the Media folder. I use about thirty in an iMovie
project called "Ballet", then delete the rest of the clips in that
project, create a new project called "London" and go to import the media
that I didn't use in the Ballet project. But they're gone, and the disk
is showing all that space is now free and available. Nice one iMovie.

pd.news...

iMovie 3.

me17...

Ah, righto. Thinking about it, I have played with iMove 3 a little -
it's... not the best of versions.

pd.news...

No.

me17...

Coolio.

pd.news...

I agree. I hope there is an obvious way to make the clips available to
other iMovie projects. When you import clips from another project, does
it duplicate the clips? It would be a royal pain if it had the same
behaviour, so after importing the clips (but actually only creating
pointers to them) you deleted them from the original project, only to
find they'd disappeared from the new project too.

me17...

iMovie HD (and Ithink everything above 3) uses the proper windowing
system, rather than going full-screen. So you just open your original
project, open your new project, and copy the clips across (dragon drop,
copy/paste, whatever). It duplicates the actual media.

On the other hand, if you have 20Gb of clips, you don't want to
duplicate them in every project that uses them if you're doing a number
of projects with a lot of overlap.

me17...

Well, I disagree. Since you'll (presumably) be editing the clips, if you
make an edit in one project you don't want it to screw up the other one.
Disk space is cheap.

Whether it duplicates the clips or not, it needs to be very obvious what
is happening because each method has its own drawbacks and advantages.

me17...

Well, the way it works now seems to me to reflect the way most (all?)
other apps treat their documents; for example, if you copy the same
picture into two Word docs, you can delete the original - or the image
now embedded in one of the docs - without affecting the image in the
other doc [1].

That seems like a logical way to do things to me.

-zoara-

[1] I know you can do some kind of 'insert a reference rather than
copying the image into the doc' but I suspect that most people a) don't
use this and b) would find it confusing if it did.

It just deleted all that importing off the disk, without "deleting the
clips from the project will delete them off the disk. Are you sure you
want to do that?"

At least it's only 45 minutes to re-import the stuff, but what a
frigging pain in the arse.

David Kennedy...

I'm glad you warned me, I've got some stuff to do later this week.