Cropping video

A few at £125 each !!! This is ridiculous. Not only are you keeping the original file, you have to keep a rendered massive version of itself also. Again, nobody has explained why an exported video file becomes a monster when it is trimmed, not at 100% quality. Music and photos don't do this.

Because video files straight out the camera are very compressed in every consumer camera....talking about photo if you think that a dslr jpeg photo is about 20/40 mb and it's just a single frame you can guess how much the camera compresses every single frame to give you a footage that is about 50/100 mb x 25/30 frames...and when you take this footage end encode it even if you low the quality and just trim it the output codec will be less compressed unless you output a long gop codec....
Hope this help and you can understand my bad english...:)

Your English is better than most English in the UK so don't worry ;-) btw JPEGs are for me around 8-10 mb

Yeah Marbury, those external hard drives are great. I picked one up for $70 that holds about 1,000 GB. You can store plenty on that. You don't HAVE to store the edited mov file if you don't want to, if you really want to save storage space you can delete the edited file. This will add a lot of time down the line though if you decide to put those files on another site and you have to re-edit them. Its also a good idea to keep your files on another drive as a backup just in case your hard drive ever crashes or motherboard gets ruined.

Well on first attempt I rendered a mp4 mpeg video here from Magix which looks as good quality but only around the same size as source. If it gets Accepted I could continue doing that. If it is only trimming video, adding a bit of contrast etc that can be soon re- done in software for upload to new sites rather than clogging up hard drive space. Then the thought of having another backup drive gets ridiculous. Its bad enough having to back up music, sfx and photos.

I went a couple years before my 750GB computer was getting too crowded and I broke down and got an external HD. I got sick of shuffling around and deleting stuff to make room for more. I'm not sure the files should be the same size though.. I'm not very technical like a lot of the guys here are, but I think your final .mov should be a lot bigger than your mp4 file. If I have a 15 second long 35mb mp4 file, the .mov is prob going to be more like 400mb. I don't have access to my original files on this computer, so can't get a specific example, but I'm pretty sure that's about what they run.

I think perhaps save the edited file to an external drive and keep the originals on your PC hard drive would be the best way to go. Just so shocking that an edited video file can grow to such a size.

If you take footage seriously you might as well start investing in external hard drives. I currently have four 3 TB on my desk and another 8 hard drives in a safe storage area away from the computer. A good lesson to learn is to never save anything important on the computers internal drive alone. Footage is more expensive when it comes to storage and bandwidth than photos, If you fight it you will end up loosing all your files eventually.

I just bought another 3TB external HD at Costco for $99. Invest in a big HD and forget about how to save everything. Keep the original and processed clip. Someday you will need them and having to reprocess gets very costly in time. Once everything is backed up you can free up space on the internal drive keeping your system running more efficient.

I have the same system except I pay more for my drives :-( :-) in England.

It's all about a Drobo where you can swap out/upgrade the drives as needed. :)