Splitting Long Videos for YouTube in iMovie

iMovie, included among other excellent consumer applications in Apple's iLife 09, now provides an easy way to share your videos on Google's YouTube video sharing service. You just prep your video, and then use the Share menu to share it in various ways. However, YouTube has a 10 minute, 1GB limit.

Using iMovie 09 with YouTube

Here's a few tips to work with those YouTube limits:

• Confirm the total video time at the bottom of the project window, and the length of a clip by hovering the mouse over the clip and looking at the time-stamp appearing at its beginning.
• Use Share menu, YouTube. If the movie is over the YouTube limit, the dialog box that appears will tell you so.
• Make a clip smaller by positioning the playhead, ctrl-clicking and selecting "Split Clip." Once clips are split you can delete parts that are not needed.
• If need be, split up your Project into two Projects. Let's say you have a 14 minute, 600 MB AVI file you have imported into your project, that you have split into two 7 minute chunks. Ctrl-click on the Project in Project Library and choose Duplicate. Rename each project to indicate which half it will be in the end. Open each half and delete the unneeded half.

I trust someone will find this useful when working with iMovie and YouTube. Enjoy!