Cannot open old project

Question

There was a topic about this that has been archived, otherwise I would have replied to that one.
Trying today to open an old iMovie project, one that was done with a prior version of iMovie (before 6/HD), and I got this error message:
+The project could not be opened, because the disk is full, the folder is locked, or the folder permission are incorrect.+
The previous thread about this did not arrive at a specific solution. And like the prior thread, one piece of the puzzle is that I have not only cloned my original hard drive to a larger one, but I've also re-installed Leopard as a "clean install", to get rid of things I've dragged along in upgrading from Panther -> Tiger -> Leopard.
Anyway, I tried looking at permissions, and they were okay as far as the chmod settings were concerned. What I missed was looking further at it in Terminal was the owner and group was not as it should be.
With one file, the owner was correct ("steven"), but the group was "501". Although that is my group, the file opened correctly when I changed all the files to have the group "staff". Whether or not this was the problem I cannot say; when I finally got it opened and save it with a different name, the group was again "501". In any case, it works to load and save now.
With another file, the owner and group were both "502", which was from changes made while using a pre-Leopard version of Mac OS X.
So, if anyone has this problem, it might get better if you can use the terminal to change the owner and group to the correct values.
To do this, for a movie named "My Great iMovie" in the user folder Movies, start Terminal and execute these commands:
cd ~/Movies
ls -laFB
This will list all files in this folder, and put a "/" at the end of directories. (Note that iMovie project files are actually folders of files). In that list should be your movie, or in my example "My Great iMovie". It might look like this:
drwxrwxrwx 23 steven 501 782 Jul 13 15:15 ./
drwx------+ 18 steven staff 612 Jun 23 17:38 ../
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 steven staff 6148 Jul 13 14:36 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 steven 501 238 Jul 13 15:17 My Great iMovie.iMovieProject/
now change to the movie project folder and display that directory:
cd "My Great iMovie.iMovieProject"
ls -laFB
and it will display something like this:
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 steven 501 238 Jul 13 15:17 ./
drwxrwxrwx 23 steven 501 782 Jul 13 15:15 ../
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 steven 501 170 Jul 13 15:17 Audio Waveforms/
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 steven 501 170 Jul 13 15:16 Cache/
-rw-r--r-- 1 steven 501 99239 Jul 13 15:15 My Great iMovie.iMovieProj
drwxr-xr-x@ 86 steven 501 2924 Jul 13 15:15 Media/
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 steven staff 170 Apr 9 2006 Shared Movies/
Note that if the owner is not the same as your short username, you will not be able to go into this folder, because you don't have permission. In that case, you will need to change the commands to have "sudo" in front of them, like this:
sudo cd "My Great iMovie.iMovieProject"
To fix the owner, enter this command:
sudo chown steven *
(but use your short username instead of mine, obviously).
To fix the group, enter this command:
sudo chgrp staff *
you can display your changes with
ls -laFB
Change back to the next directory up with:
cd ..
and be sure to do the same for the project folder also:
sudo chown steven "My Great iMovie.iMovieProject"
sudo chgrp staff "My Great iMovie.iMovieProject"
If the permission problem is what is preventing the file from opening in iMovie, this should resolve your problem.

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