iMovie: How to save edited clips to reuse??

[avarex]

iMovie 10.1.10
This seems basic but maybe I'm going about it wrong!
Here is info about my project and what I'd like to do, please tell me HOW to do this.

I have (10) 45min videos of my son's games, I want to edit those games down to maybe (5) 20sec. clips for each 45min. game. Then I want to organize those edited clips by events in library.
I don't want the whole 45min games.

some places I've read say iMovie isn't for this kind of editing? just doesn't make sense to me, we need to cut down this raw data otherwise our files are HUGE. I fooled around with quicktime, but not sure I knew what I was doing or what was happening to the video when I was done.

THANKS

 

[ColdCase]

So you don't care about the rejected portions of the videos and want to get ride of them? They can go into the trash and not use up disk space?

There is probably a dozen ways to do that. Brute force, you first import your raw video and extract the interesting clips via a "editing" working project. Then share the extracted clips as files. You can then clean up and delete the imported media and project, empty the trash. This throws away all the stuff you don't want.

Now import your extracted clip files, which are the clips you want to keep, into the events/movies organization you want. Assemble the clips into movies , fine tune the editing, and share those.

There may be quicker ways, but I'm not as familiar with the iMovie media management details and when unused portions of clips are trashed as I should be.

Instead of sharing a bunch of individual clips, you could assemble them into your 20 second videos, share those as files, clean up, and import those videos into your events for organization.

 

[kohlson]

iMovie can certainly do what you want to do, as can QT.

Most apps, iMovie and QT and FCPX, are non-destructive editors. That is, they "guide" you into making a new version from your source material. Usually, you have to work hard to get rid of the source after creating an edited clip. Using iMovie, you could create the 20-sec clip from your 45-min source, export it, and then delete the project and everything associated with it. IIRC this is a multistep process in iMovie, so best to read up on this a bit.

You'll then have a collection of 20-sec clips, without the associated source. As needed, you can import them again to another project. Note that there will be a slight quality loss with this approach, but probably not noticeable.