Macs are a lot of fun. Everybody gets to pretend they know how to edit a movie or write a song. Of course, no amount of cool toys will make my movies or songs come out better, but that’s a separate issue. Anyway, today I had need to burn a 14gb iMovie project that was burning up my disk but I wanted to keep a backup of. I looked for some GUI tool, some automated way to do it, then finally had to just settle for this:
tar -zc iMovieProjectName.iMovieProject|split -b8000m - iMovieProjectCompressed.tar.gz.
This produces iMovieProjectCompressed.tar.gz.aa and .ab. I’m using DL DVDs that can store up to 8.5gb a piece, so this was fine for me. For a smaller project or a project being burnt to CDs or single layer DVDs, simply adjust the -b option to split to have the files created in smaller chunks.
Not as elegant as a built-in Mac solution would surely be, and it requires a lot of extra space on your hard drive to create the files to burn, but it works.
Oh yeah, to restore, you’ll have to copy all the pieces back to one place, then you can use:
cat file1.aa file1.ab file1.ac|tar -zx
to extract the original project.
If you’re l33t enough to write shell scripts, you’re l33t enough to use Final Cut.
Additionally, if you’re l33t enough to write a post about using shell scripts, you’re too l33t to use iMovie.
Left by David on November 16th, 2007