Anyone using AVCHD footage on a mac running Snow Leopard can use the technique of archiving explained above either the whole camcorder or SD Card etc. by creating a dish image anywhere, my preference is to save on 2TB external disk

When you wish to access it double click the “yourdiskimage”.dmg mounting it to your desktop

using iMovie 09: all your files will show up and you can select all to transfer all or uncheck all and select individual files to transfer to iMovie project

For Pro Apps
do the same as above except go File–> log and transfer on Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro drag the clips you want into the queue or select automatic and all will be transferred to your open project

when you are done go to disk utility and and eject the mounted image

Aloha

There are two programs that I’ve found but neither are freeware, however, they do both offer free trials.
R-Drive (15 day trial)
WinImage (30 day tiral)

See how you get on with either of the above programs, just create .iso files rather than .dmg files as explained in this blog.

If you do manage to find one, please let me know.

Scoopz (Admin)

Any ideas what i can do?

Don’t worry about your initial backup being smaller than your used HDD space, the backup will probably excluded all the default operating system files as these can be restored from the original install DVDs, it might also be choosing to not backup any temporary files, caches, built in print drivers, multiple languages, etc which would easily amount to 5GB. There’s a free app called Monolingual that can do this for you, I ran it and saved 5GB+ on my MB Air.

Scoopz (Admin)

One question: My hard drive is 38.74GB but the Time Machine backup is only 33.63GB. Could you explain why the backup is smaller? I’ve checked and there are no exclusions listed other than the external hard drive.

Thanks

Moving on, when you import the movies from the virtual SDHC DMG images into iMovie it is going to result in HUGE file sizes like you have found. Without sitting at my Mac I’m sure there’s an option that lets you pick which drive to use to store the imported movie files? You can certainly move them to the USB drive BUT bear in mind a USB2.0 drive is not going to be as quick as an internal drive or a Firewire drive when it comes to editing the raw movie data. I tend to move mine to an internal RAID array (several disks arranged to give much quicker than normal read/write speeds), I’ve never tried it from a USB drive so couldn’t tell you how much of a performance loss there is going to be but give it a try.

You might want to keep the raw data on the main internal drive whilst you edit it, then once the movie is complete, export it and then move the raw files to the USB HDD (I think you just drag and drop them in iMovie browser window).

IMPORTANT: If you put the raw movie footage onto your internal drive, say a 26GB file, then by default this 26GB file will get backed up to your Time Machine drive and you’ll soon find 320GB is gone. If you are going to work this way, in the preferences for Time Machine add the iMovie Projects Events folder to the list of folders NOT included in the backup.

I’ve just returned a 500GB WD Passprt drive to WD for replacement as it died completely. For this reason I wouldn’t recommend moving your iMovie collection to the same drive that your Time Machine Backup is on. Leave the iPhoto Library on your main drive and then if your computer dies you’ve got a backup on your TM drive and vice versa. Also, there would be a performance loss running iPhoto off a USB drive.

Scoopz (Admin)

I have now bought a 320gb external hard drive. I’ve backed up my mac using time machine and I have also moved the ‘SDHC backup’ folder to the external hard drive.

I have imported the movie into imovies and it has created a folder of 26GB. Would you recommend moving the entire movies folder to the external drive? Will I still be able to edit it easily in imovies?

Also, would you recommend moving my entire iphoto library to an external drive? Is it easy to continue working of this?

Thanks again.

I’ve just looked at the most recent event I’ve imported at HD resolution into iMovie 09 and it’s 23mins and 7 seconds long and is coming in at 15.87GB once extracted from the SDHC card and I think that was shot in the lowest quality HD setting on my camera.

I always import my movies at the highest possible resolution but that’s because I’m not short on space and could potentially watch a HD edited video via my AppleTV. If, however, you are only planning on editing a movie and then burning it to DVD to watch on a standard DVD player then I see no *real* reason to import at full resolution, a DVD is:
-720 x 480 (NTSC)
-720 x 576 (PAL)
so importing using iMovie 09′s Large option [960x540] rather than Full [1920x1080] will be more than sufficient for DVD.

However, lets say in the future Apple bundle BluRay superdrives into their newest models, if you had imported at full resolution you could simply re-export to DVD and have the edited movie in glorious HD, if you only imported at Large quality then all is not lost, as you’ve used my tutorial to make digital archives of the SDHC cards so you can always re-import the footage at full resolution BUT you will have to re-edit all the scenes, cut, chop etc.

I’m going to import a 2 minute clip from my camera now at Large and Full resolution for you and see what the resulting file size, hence disk space saving, really is.

UPDATE : I’ve just imported a 2min 38 second clip and the resulting file sizes in iMovie 09 are:
Large [960x540] = 528.7MB
Full [1920x1080] = 1.84GB
So importing at Large resolution is going to take up around 30% of the size of Full resolution but obvious the quality.
Scoopz (Admin)

Thanks again.

You can easily move the disk image back to the SDHC card to view on your TV, I’m assuming the only HD source you have for your TV is the output from the HD video camera and whatever SDHC card is in that. Just insert a blank SDHC card into your card reader and then click “Restore” in Disk Utility app and browse to the DMG image and restore it back to the SDHC card, make sure the card is blank first because all media on the target drive will be erased. Regards other ways of getting HD onto your tv, I’ve not dabbled with any Blu-Ray players or burners yet, I’ve got some AppleTV’s around the house which can handle HD but I’ve not yet exported HD video from my camera to the AppleTV yet but I might give it a go and see how it looks.

Scoopz (Admin)

Also, if I wanted to view the High Def movie, could I move the disk image back to the SDHC card? If not, how can I view the High Def movie on my tv?

Thanks again.

This is similar to what I tried to do the first time I needed to free up an SDHC card but didn’t want to wait for all the video to import into iMovie. For this reason I had to create the .DMG image file from the SDHC card and then mount that to use as the source for iMovie to import.

I have a feeling some of the other folders on the SDHC card (perhaps hidden folders) contain some important information about the codec iMovie/Final Cut Pro/etc need to use. You could try using TinkerTool (free app) to turn on the option to view hidden files in OS X and then see what shows up on an SDHC card, perhaps there is a hidden .panasonic folder that has codec info in that you can simply copy into the folder you’ve already copied the files to.

What happens if you drag the video files back from the folder on your hard drive to an SDHC card and then try and import from the SDHC card to Final Cut Pro? Don’t format the card before doing this just in case it overwrites any hidden folders, just copy over the top of an SDHC card and “replace all” if it asks.

Last resort, can you drag the AVCHD files from the folder you created to VLC and will they play? You may be able to use a video conversion tool (VisualHub was really good but no longer available, the source files are now freely available somewhere) to convert the avchd files to raw footage that Final Cut Pro can handle?

Keep me posted on your findings.

Scoopz (Admin)