Was an 80gb Hard Drive Not Big Enough

[mondo joe]

I have a new powerbook (as in THE new powerbook).

It starts at 80gb. I've put office and firefox on it and the Finder says I have 53.3 GB available.

I've tried to transfer some "video" files from my desktop to burn DVDs with, and when I run them through IMovie they result in huge 20-40gb files.

If I add my music, photos and other things they'll eat into the 53.3gb available and then I'll be screwed.

Does this seem absolutely crazy?

Is it time to get an external hard drive???

[Poiuyt]

1. Somethings not right there

I have Office, Firefox and about 100 other applications in an old Blue & White with a 17GB hard drive and I still have room.

The size of video files depends on how long they are and how they were compressed.

[mondo joe]

2. I did ask at the Apple store - I was told the video are decompressed (or

I did ask at the Apple store - I was told the video are decompressed (or is that UNcompressed?) when imported into iMovie, which is why they become enormous.

[alfredo]

4. That makes sense.

[mondo joe]

5. WOOHOO! I made sense! Now...

...what do I do about it?

I have zero experience with external hard drives.

Do I just firewire up to it and store the BIG data on it?

Can I access it wirelessly?

[ralps]

6. I needed to get an external hard drive to store my movies/music

It stores the information with no problem via firewire. You just have to tell iMovie where to look for the movie.
:hi:

[NuttyFluffers]

12. if low intensity, can just use ipod as ext. hdd.

if it's just storage you can just use your ipod (or let this need persuade you to get an ipod, *nudge, nudge*). uses usb 2.0 or firewire. if you are doing video editing though, just store the finished excess stuff on the ipod, let the int. hdd. do the harder processing.

but it still sounds odd. 80gb is a lot of space. i have 40 years of family photos (15+ full body photo albums plus several slides, mini booklets, and negatives) on my harddrive and i roughly have 2 cds worth of space needed (not like i need to scan family photos within a picometer of their existence). i also have around 20+gb of music, talking about around 300 albums. this amount of space shouldn't be so easily gobbled up.

hmm, so the videos are fully decompressed are they? can't quick time play them in a more compressed format? itunes can play music in more compressed formats outside of .wav, so i'm surprised there's nothing similar for movies. and if it is uncompressed and there's nothing you can do, what type of movies are these that they need to be on your harddrive? home movies? work? sure you can't just make a spare copy and save some harddrive space? blank cds and dvds are pretty cheap, and it's only with jewel cases that they start to add up in space and weight.

[Poiuyt]

7. I'm sorry, but it doesn't make sense to me

iMovie works in the DV format. 1GB will store 4-5 minutes of video in the DV format. So unless you've been making 3 hour movies, something is wrong. When you import your movies into iMovie, what format are they to begin with? How did you make the movies that are on your desktop? When you say that you are running the files through iMovie, what do you mean? Are you exporting the finished product in some way?

If you are using a DV camcorder, the compression is done in the camera. The transfer into your computer is via firewire and you edit while still in the DV format. The only way that there would be any decompression is if the video files on your desktop were in a more highly compressed format (such as the DVD format).

That being said, working with video means working with VERY large files. I have two 160GB drives and one 120GB drive for my work, and it's still not enough. If you plan on doing a lot of this, then an external firewire drive would be a good idea (no wireless for hard drives).

As far as there only being 53GB left on your hard drive, remember that the operating system takes up a big chunk of space. It still seems like too much to me. You could try starting your computer from the startup disk and running Disk Utility to see if there's anything wrong. Repair permissions while you are in Disk Utility. Your computer is new, so there hasn't been much time for garbage to accumulate (though I never trust Microsoft products). You can search for files which are larger than a certain size in the finder. That will show you what's taking up all the space.

Aside from video files, I don't think you have to worry about anything else filing up your hard drive too much. Pictures, music, word doc, etc will take some space, but you should be able to go a long time before it gets filled up.

[mondo joe]

8. Answers and more questions...

Thanks for the advice.

The files I'm using are avi and mpg files previously downloaded to my desktop.

The nice guy at the Apple store explained that as iMovie imports them it decompresses them so they turn into huge files.

Thanks for mention of your drives. It sounds like if I'm going to do more of this even a large built in drive wouldn't be adequate over time anyway. So that's good to know.

I'll look for the BIG files with the Finder.

Thanks again!

[alfredo]

3. It's good to have an external drive for backup.

[progressiveBadger]

9. An external FW drive is a good thing for DV editing

The hard drive in your laptop is probably not optimum for video editing. If I remember correctly, FCP recommends 7200 RMP drives, and I don't think powerbooks are coming with anything but 5400 RPM still. I may be wrong, but still, capturing video to a firewire drive will be a much nicer experience.

[geekgrrl]

10. are you running Norton anti-virus? I heard that it can eat up HD space.

Just a thought- I agree something doesn't sound right.

I have a 30gb and need more space. But on my 30gb I have 10 gigs of music, over 5000 iphotos and a bunch of apps (office, adobe CS, etc...)

I would turn on the option in the finder to calculate file and folder size, and just go through each folder (your harddrive, user folder and subfolders) and sort by size- see where the big stuff is. It will take a little bit of detective work but maybe you can narrow down what is going on.

[meegbear]

11. Do you let it run overnight?

I was reading that macs have maintaneince scripts that are scheduled to run between 3 and 5 am. These handle internal file management, cleanup, etc. and will only run at their designated times -they won't run at bootup.

Not that it'll gain you anything, but something to consider. Another thing - does it have Version 9 installed? If you are not going to be running any legacy software, you may want to consider uninstalling that too.

I have an 80G G4 and I'm around 50G - that's with Netscape, Office 2004, Norton Anti-virus and Personal Firewall, and a LOT of downloaded files I have to sort thru.