Internal Drive Maxed, Losing Gigs of Free Memory After Cleanup

[dgp1973]

I am using iMovie to edit a film. The external drive I use is hooked up usually but most of the footage was directly onto the drive inside the Mac. The internal drive maxed out and I get the warning message about it, free some space or things won't be able to be saved.

So I did this a few times and a day or two ago cleared about 70 gigs of memory, maybe more. It took a while and was a pain in the ass but obviously has to be done, no big deal. But I went to do some editing today and somehow that 70 gigs is used?! WTF. I cannot keep clearing out memory. I had cleared out 10 gigs here, 5 here, 20 here before doing the 70 and there's just like a worm in there eating memory or something.

This has stopped my power to continue editing a $10,000 movie project (which is just a rough cut at home but will be done with serious software once I'm ready to polish the working version). I think I can manage to switch the footage over into the internal drive. There's a lot of space I can clear up from my other files but I now think if I clear up 100 gigabytes it will just
be used somewhere I cannot find in a couple of days.

It's maddening to me. Affording a new drive and replacing the internal one, all that would be a huge huge pain in the ass, getting a whole new computer would be unaffordable.

I'm sure there is someone who can figure this out? it reminds me of those lithium batteries which will get half their life when you charge them before they are out of juice. You just cannot get the same function once it's been clipped.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Make sure your Trash is empty & also iMovie may have it's own trash so you'd need to keep on top of that too. Also what you refer to as "memory" is actually hard drive space & memory is known as RAM (Random Access Memory). Hopefully we'll sort this out & give you back some precious hard drive space so you can get back to work!

 

[dgp1973]

The trash is empty, I've emptied it many times to get rid of all that storage. What I don't understand is how the 70 gigs of memory disappears without being used. I did about 30 seconds of editing work in Imovie and is says I have 50 megs left. I didn't download anything, didn't add any video to the library or other files. It just went away. This has happened to me before on drives which hit capacity, they suddenly can no longer use space the same way for some reason. So I'm going to have to consider replacing the internal drive and installing Yosemite from scratch.

 

[Cory Cooper]

As Spawn_Dooley mentioned, depending on the version of iMovie, it may also have a Trash that needs emptied.

-Which version of OS X?
-Which version of iMovie?

C

 

[dgp1973]

10.10.5 Yosemite
10.0.6 Imovie

Just looked up trash in IMovie, There is no longer an option to removie trash from the File drop down menu as before.
THnking about just getting a new internal drive. Cant waste much more time

 

[honestone]

Not sure if this will completely help you (and especially since I don't use iMovie), but via a search for "How to remove imovie's Trash", here is one of the "hits":

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5489940

That "Show Package Contents" is not available in El Capitan (I am on OS 10.11.1), but I was able to move the folder to the Trash, and deleted it.

I then quit Google, did a restart, and launched iMovie. The folder was created again.

 

[dgp1973]

Still no luck. Will boosting my RAM give me more stable memory for GIGS of storage? It went from 60 gigs now it's at 1.5 . I did about 30 seconds of editing.
This is a 90 min movie so this is going to have a lot of room. I have a 2 TB drive attached. I'm going to focus on trying to transfer all files to that drive and see if it will save to that drive. Otherwise, I will replace the internal drive and boot it with Apple CD's (lot of $ and wasted time).

 

[honestone]

Still no luck. Will boosting my RAM give me more stable memory for GIGS of storage? It went from 60 gigs now it's at 1.5 . I did about 30 seconds of editing.
This is a 90 min movie so this is going to have a lot of room. I have a 2 TB drive attached. I'm going to focus on trying to transfer all files to that drive and see if it will save to that drive. Otherwise, I will replace the internal drive and boot it with Apple CD's (lot of $ and wasted time).

Having more RAM is not going to help regarding the storage of the file you are creating. But, one would think you could save it to the external drive.

 

[dgp1973]

I think it's taken care of by simply making a new library based out of the external drive

 

[dgp1973]

I still beed a RAM boost. Not sure if that's right about the hard drive storage because have been told that hard drive can be used for RAM applications in some cases? Virtual RAM, etc. Not sure what's going on but I need to max my RAM and just deal with the external, problem solved. I'm back to editing now
thanks everyone

 

[honestone]

I think it's taken care of by simply making a new library based out of the external drive

Good to hear. Let us know if you have the same "eating" storage issues with the external drive.

 

[honestone]

I still beed a RAM boost. Not sure if that's right about the hard drive storage because have been told that hard drive can be used for RAM applications in some cases? Virtual RAM, etc. Not sure what's going on but I need to max my RAM and just deal with the external, problem solved. I'm back to editing now
thanks everyone

Yes, it will be helpful when you run either "Ram hogging" applications, or you are running quite a few applications at the same time. For situations like that, having more RAM available can help alleviate the need for virtual memory, which is just using some of your hard disk space as memory. That of course is a slower process for the application/applications.