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!

Saving Downloading FLV Files using the Safari Activities Window

If you have a YouTube video you covet, you can save it to your hard drive using the videodownloader Firefox extension, or using other websites such as KeepVid. For sites that do not work this way, you can grab the file from Safari's "Activities" window. Here's how:

1. Load the page with the video and let the video start playing.
2. Select Activity from the Window menu.
3. In the list of all the URLs referenced in the current page, you will see one file that is indicated as being larger than the rest. Press and hold Option, then double-click on this listing to download the file to your Downloads folder.

Now you can use FFMPEGX or the like to convert the FLV to another format, or, extract its audio.

Have fun but don't fill up your boot drive, kids. :-)