Can we recover lost work?

Question

A colleague and I have been working on a large project, 100 GB worth.We started on my MBP and saved it to an external Lacie HD.Then she carried on using her MB.
After trimming it down and cropping out the unwanted stuff we added transitions and themes but imovie starting acting a bit unstable. Yesterday when she opened it, it was completely blank! After almost having a fit we found everything in the trash and put it back in the timeline but it's all out of order and all the transitions, themes and cropping we did are all gone (It wasn't because it was closed without saving beforehand, by the way).
That was many days work!
Is there any way we can find all the transitions, themses etc and have them back in the right place or are we doomed to start all over again? Also, what are the most likely reasons for this kind of thing happening?

Answer 1

Yes. You should be able to recover whatever you had done up to your last save. iMovie saves these prior 'saves' in the project files, but if you have saved your newest work after dragging things from the trash, you will not be able to recover the older project information because iMovie's later save overwrites it.
As per Karl Petersen, here is the way to do it:
+There's a QuickTime movie inside the project that may still be able to play your project. In iMovie HD it's inside the Cache folder of the project package, and it's called "Timeline Movie.mov". (To open the iMovie HD package, Control-click on the project icon and choose Show Package Contents.)+
+If the movie plays okay, the movie can be imported to a NEW iMovie project to rescue your work. Everything will arrive as a single clip, but everything will be there and play in the proper order.+
+It's crucial you NOT save the messed-up project right now, for that will destroy the good QuickTime movie, replacing it with a bad "empty" movie.+
As far as why it occurred, it is hard to know. Maybe the preference files got corrupted, maybe some clips did. Also, when it was on the external drive was iMovie playing and working ok? The external drive needs to be Mac-formatted for iMovie to work properly. If you recover the movie and SAVE it to a new iMovie project, you should close it, and delete iMovie's preference file: YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.imovie.plist. Drag this plist file to the trash. When you open iMovie again, a new one will be created.
Please post back if you cannot find the project quicktime movie, or if it does not work for you.