[johnnie_five]

I used my Panasonic camera, FZ100, and took some videos in AVCHD format on 16gb SDHC memory card. I then used iMovie to transfer it to my iMac.
What little videos on my 16gb card took over 100gb of my hard drive space on my iMac.
Why did the file size balloon to that when it got transferred to the computer?
How can I keep the file small without losing the quality?

Thanks in advance

[smax013]

 johnnie_five, on 24 December 2012 - 08:58 AM, said:

I used my Panasonic camera, FZ100, and took some videos in AVCHD format on 16gb SDHC memory card. I then used iMovie to transfer it to my iMac.
What little videos on my 16gb card took over 100gb of my hard drive space on my iMac.
Why did the file size balloon to that when it got transferred to the computer?
How can I keep the file small without losing the quality?

Thanks in advance

I believe iMovie uses some form of an uncompressed file format. Since the idea is that you are editing the video (that is what iMovie is for), they are giving you "full" quality for that editing purpose.

If you don't need to edit it or are done editing it, then you should be able to export the video to a compress file format that is much smaller in size and then delete the iMovie file.