Sunday October 17th, 2021
5:30 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I mentioned my issues with exporting that last YouTube video. And I mentioned that I finally got it done. And then I went on to make a thumbnail and do the other work to finalize it. I was finally able to move on to some other project. However, in the afternoon, I suddenly realized that in all the confusion and effort, I had completely forgotten to include the final Relive animated map in the video. That meant I had to re-edit the video. And then I had to re-export it and re-upload it. I inserted the Relive movie without any problem. It just took some time. But then, for some reason, the video would no longer export. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. It began the export process, and that export process continued for about an hour and a half. And when there was about two minutes left, it failed. I thought the problem was that I had let the battery of my smartphone get too weak, and it didn’t have enough juice to finish the export. I thought that was my mistake.
Therefore, I plugged in the phone, let it charge up for a while, and then I started the export process again. As before, it hummed along just fine for an hour and a half. But with two minutes left, it failed. I got a message each time saying that there had been an encoding error. It now seemed to me that the Relive movie was the problem. The file had exported just fine without it. But now that I’d added it, the export encountered an encoding problem. I don’t know why this would be. I didn’t even insert the Relive movie directly. I had edited it in the same video editing program, where I added music. And then I exported it as a regular MP4 file. And I inserted that final MP4 file into the longer vlog video. It should have been fine. The only difference is that the free version of Relive does not produce a high-def video file. It is a 560p file. But I exported it at 1080p. Maybe that caused the problem. I’ll have to run a couple of tests today to figure out where the problem is.
When the dust settled on all this, I simply gave up. I wasn’t able to re-export the video project, and I simply used the original video that I’d already uploaded – the one that didn’t contain the Relive movie. I posted the Relive movie as a separate YouTube video. That was all I could do.
And that was far from the end of my technology troubles for the day. I’ve become more determined than ever to incorporate this MacBook into my video production process, and I settled in to edit a couple of movies on iMove. With the added horsepower of the Mac, I assumed video editing would be a breeze. However, even after all this time, and after watching a lot of tutorial videos and reading a lot of online guides, I still have no clue how iMovie works. I can’t explain it, but iMovie (and this MacBook in general) uses a logic, a language, and a flow that I just can’t wrap my brain around.
The problem I ran into yesterday is that the MacBook ran out of hard drive space. I never quite know what the MacBook is up to, to be honest. And in this case, I got a message that said the hard drive was running out of space, and I had to decide whether to continue or cancel some kind of ongoing task or process going on in the background. But I had no clue what this task or process was. I hadn’t told the Mac to do anything. I wasn’t exporting a file or copying files or doing anything. So, what was the Mac doing? I had no idea. So I took a risk and just cancelled the task, whatever it might be. But the same message popped up over and over again.
I eventually came to the conclusion that with the limited hard drive space, I could work on only one video at a time. I could load the raw files for one video and complete it, but that’s it. I wouldn’t be able to load the files for a second video. I’d have to wait for the first one to finish, delete all the files, and then start fresh with the second.
But it turns out that even that doesn’t work. Even when I had a mere fifty or sixty gigabytes of files copied to the Mac, the hard drive still maxed out. And after a lot of research and work, I discovered why this was happening. It turns out that iMovie has to import and somehow transform and therefore make a copy of every file that you add to a video project. So, even though the raw video files amounted to 50 gigabytes, by the time iMovie had finished importing them, those files took up 100 gigabytes. Plus, even when you are finished editing a video and you’ve exported it and you’ve deleted all the old files, the hard drive is still full. And that’s because iMovie keeps a copy of all those video files in its system even after you’ve deleted them! I found a bunch of YouTube tutorial videos describing the very complicated process you have to follow in order to purge iMovie of all the original video files. And this involves using the settings to show the technical and deeply hidden files on your system. Then I have to dive down into the folder structure until I finally locate iMovie and then look for a folder called “Package Contents” for each particular video project. And inside this Package Contents folder, I can locate the system copy of those old files and remove them.
Why is all this necessary? I have no idea. I’m accustomed to the world of Windows and PCs where you simply delete files and they’re gone. The Apple philosophy seems to be to take much of the control of the computer away from the user. It does things by itself.
But on this journey of locating files, I also had to come to grips with just how iMovie organizes files and projects and media and media libraries and some weird thing called “iMovie Events”. And even after an entire day of research and work, I couldn’t figure it out. It was so frustrating. The logic of the system completely eluded me. And I was far from alone in this. One thing I was trying to figure out was the differences between Project Media, Libraries, All Events, iMovie Library, and Events. iMovie appeared to spread all the files out among these categories, and I had no clue what was going on. And when I did my research, I found myself looking at endless YouTube videos about the difference between an Event and a Library and a Project. No one really knows, as far as I can make out. What the heck is an event? I still don’t know. Is it just a folder? Why can’t iMovie just use the folders that I create when I copy my original video clips from memory cards?
Again, I am accustomed to the world of PCs where I simply control all of this myself. I create a folder and give that folder a name. Then I copy all of my video files into that folder. And when I start a new video project in my video editing software, I simply open that folder and choose the video files I want to add. That’s it. No copies are made. There is no need for mysterious events. There are no media libraries. In short, there is no weird cascading system of automated file storage and categorization and duplication and even triplication.
And even weirder things started to happen. I had made my peace with the idea that iMovie would always make a second copy of everything and keep it hidden from me. I started to see that I shouldn’t copy video files from my memory cards to the hard drive. I should simply allow iMovie to import those video files directly from the memory card. And then I can remove the memory card from the system. And this might minimize the amount of memory required.
However, for some strange reason, iMovie started to duplicate ALL of the video files that it had already imported. I had a full set of video files for my video project already. They were right there in some kind of media library window. They weren’t in any folder as far as I could tell. I didn’t know where they were. But they were in this window in iMovie and I could access them and add them to my project and edit them. However, out of nowhere, I saw that iMovie was slowly making a third copy of every single video file. I have no idea why. I just saw them being made, and they kept popping up right beside the original copy that I’d imported. This went on for a long time. And this made my life even more complicated, because iMovie doesn’t even tell me the names of these video files. All I see is the thumbnail. I don’t understand this at all. I looked everywhere to locate a setting where I could at least see the file names. What I really wanted to do was change the view from thumbnails to a simple folder directory list. I just wanted to see a list of all the files with their names, size, type, creation date and time, etc. But that doesn’t appear to be possible in iMovie. It will show you these thumbnails, and that’s it. And iMovie won’t even autoscroll! This has been driving me crazy. When you play your video as you are editing it, the timeline doesn’t move with it. It just stays stuck exactly where it was. I can’t figure this out at all. Why does it work this way? I can’t see the advantage. It drives me crazy that the video preview I’m watching isn’t represented in the editing timeline below. What’s the point of that? I just don’t get it. And there is no setting to change this.
The short version of this story is that I’m done with iMovie. I’ve wasted enough of my life trying to figure it out. And, frankly, I hate everything about it. How and why is it so popular? Who can possibly figure out how to use it? And why would anyone use it? Is everyone a kind of computer genius except for me? I still hope to use this MacBook for editing videos, but it won’t be on iMovie. I spent some time yesterday looking for alternatives. And there are a bunch of them. DaVinci Resolve comes highly recommended, as does Hitman Films. I watched a detailed tutorial on DaVinci Resolve from Primal Video on YouTube, and I understood everything the guy said. It seemed logical and intuitive. I will probably try that program first.
And I’m not sure that anything else happened yesterday. In fact, I just realized that with all this trouble, I never once left my room here at the guest house. I never went outside for the entire day. I started working at the crack of dawn when I woke up, and I kept working until I went to sleep at night. And I never really made any progress at all. I just went around in circles all day long. Today, I will be starting largely from zero with a brand new video editing app. I’m going to uninstall iMovie and try out an alternative. I’ll probably try DaVinci Resolve first. I’m at the start of a new and exciting Learning Curve. But hopefully, this learning curve will eventually lead somewhere productive, unlike iMovie.