Help with Video Storage/Mac/iMovie

77GreenMachine

77GreenMachine

Phillip Talton
Joined
Mar 30, 2010
Location
Trinity, NC
I use iMovie on my MacBook Air. I have all my video organized on redundant Western Digital HDD Hard Drives.
My iMovie library runs thru this hard drive which keeps my laptop from getting clogged up. HOWEVER, large video projects have become painful to edit. The playback in iMovie is glitchy and skips. This has caused me to loath editing now! I recently bought this WD 5TB Hard Drive (My Passport for Mac) thinking that would be faster and fix my problem but it didn't.

Do I need to switch to an SSD style hard drive with the thunderbolt connection? I have looked them up and read about them but I find all this stuff so over my head with the ramagigbit-handmeabeer talk.

When my library did NOT run thru the external HD I did not have this issue. I either need to step up my Mac or fork over the money for a faster Hard Drive.

Please give your advice, I hope to order whatever I need by the end of the day cause I can no longer edit like this. It has killed my motivation and production time. I've been dealing with it for a while.

Here's a sunset just because I love sunsets.
IMG_6012.jpeg
 
77GreenMachine said:
I use iMovie on my MacBook Air. I have all my video organized on redundant Western Digital HDD Hard Drives.
My iMovie library runs thru this hard drive which keeps my laptop from getting clogged up. HOWEVER, large video projects have become painful to edit. The playback in iMovie is glitchy and skips. This has caused me to loath editing now! I recently bought this WD 5TB Hard Drive (My Passport for Mac) thinking that would be faster and fix my problem but it didn't.

Do I need to switch to an SSD style hard drive with the thunderbolt connection? I have looked them up and read about them but I find all this stuff so over my head with the ramagigbit-handmeabeer talk.

When my library did NOT run thru the external HD I did not have this issue. I either need to step up my Mac or fork over the money for a faster Hard Drive.

Please give your advice, I hope to order whatever I need by the end of the day cause I can no longer edit like this. It has killed my motivation and production time. I've been dealing with it for a while.

Here's a sunset just because I love sunsets. View attachment 421715
Click to expand...
I can't speak for the Mac, but I process scans for work that can be north of 15 gb after processing. The ssd with thunderbolt made transfer a lot faster for us.
 
What type of connection is your external HD? USB3.0 or better should be in most cases, okay for editing, SSD for sure would help with speeds there.

What kind of RAM and GPU do you have? I bet a fair amount of it is caused by using a MacBook Air. It is not a powerhouse system made for editing.

Honestly you probably need to both upgrade your computer and drive.
 
Honestly, I don't know. I have 8GB of memory and 245GB storage-177 of which is available.
This was like a $750 laptop from Costco so it was certainly entry level.


Screenshot 2024-07-24 at 12.15.41 PM.png
 
I believe this is a USB 3.0 to a USB-C adaptor.

I was under the impression when I ordered it that it was specifically for Mac and that I wouldn’t have any adapters but this is how it showed up.
IMG_6020.jpeg
 
Thunderbolt will speed up the connection for sure. I am not familiar with iMovie, but with Adobe Premier, you can edit in a lower resolution than the final product (ie 1080p vs 4k). Have you tried putting the files on the mac hard drive, perform the editing, and then transfer it all back to the external? Might be more work/time, but a work around vs buying hardware.
 
paradisePWoffrd said:
Thunderbolt will speed up the connection for sure. I am not familiar with iMovie, but with Adobe Premier, you can edit in a lower resolution than the final product (ie 1080p vs 4k). Have you tried putting the files on the mac hard drive, perform the editing, and then transfer it all back to the external? Might be more work/time, but a work around vs buying hardware.
Click to expand...

I’ve looked for a way to import that particular project into iMovie but haven’t figured that out.

I’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time but I still have a ton of stuff to learn.
 
Any reason you couldn't move the file to the laptop, edit it, save, and then move it back to the hard drive for storage? Any remote device is going to be slower than the built in hard drive.
 
paradisePWoffrd said:
Thunderbolt will speed up the connection for sure. I am not familiar with iMovie, but with Adobe Premier, you can edit in a lower resolution than the final product (ie 1080p vs 4k). Have you tried putting the files on the mac hard drive, perform the editing, and then transfer it all back to the external? Might be more work/time, but a work around vs buying hardware.
Click to expand...

I’ve looked for a way to import that particular project into iMovie but haven’t figured that out.

I’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time but I still have a ton of stuff to learn.
 
By your pic we wouldn't be able to tell if its actually USB3.0, so I'll just assume it is

8GB of ram on an M1 processor doing video editing I bet you are using a lot of the internal HD as supplemental ram.

If you really want to do heavy video editing, 32GB would be the min I would look for.

Open up activity monitor -> Memory, when you are editing and stuff is skipping around, what does the data look like there?

1721852439115.png


Then also take a look at your CPU load

1721852503802.png
 
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