HELP! No Audio Clip 01 Silent lost audio no sound

Question

Hello, need help with the following please:
I have three projects that I created in imovie 4. I only imported them in iMovie 4 and then saved them on my external hard drive. I should note however that I had problems with that hard drive, i.e., sometimes not all folders/files would transfer just by dragging the main project folder. So I would have to manually drag media and cache subfolders. Continuing, I like to edit files from my internal hard drive, so I dragged the three projects back some weeks later. By this time however I had already upgraded to iMovie HD. The transfer back to the internal was not a problem. But when I opened one project and played the first clip “CLIP 01” there was no audio. But all other clips DID have audio. When I worked with the other two projects I had the same problem: only CLIP 01 had lost its audio. All three projects were were filmed in Digital8. I tried all of the following attempts at solving:
-     restarting iMovie
-     restarting the computer
-     turning on/off different tracks in all possible combinations
-     changing iMovie sound volume
-     changing computer speaker sound volume
-     extracting audio
-     extracting audio with wave form
-     showing clip volume levels and checking to see if those were at 0 %
-     creating a new blank project, and importing CLIP 01 from one of the other movies to see if the audio would magically show up
-     changing the name of CLIP 01 to something else
after all these attempts failed, I went back to the original DV tape of one of the projects and imported the first clip, once again.
Unfortunately, I have already re-used the tapes of the other two projects for filming something else.
If anyone could offer any other solution, or has any idea what might be going on, why I lost my audio on only the first clip in three different occasions, I would really appreciate it. I want my audio back!!

Answer 1

First of all, though it may not be relevant to you, Miguel, but it may be a warning to others: when using an external hard disc ALWAYS make sure that the disc is formatted as "HFS+" or "Mac OS" BEFORE you start copying anything onto it, as a disc formatted as something else (..e.g; PC DOS or Windows..) will lose some of the vital info about your stored files, and thus they'll NOT replay properly in iMovie!
As all the rest of your clips, apart from Clip 01, seem to be OK, that doesn't seem to be your problem. I do remember someone else having this kind of trouble, but I haven't been here on this Discussion for a few weeks, so I may be a bit out-of-date, or have lost the original discussion about this ..so others may know more about solving this than I do.
Try playing the clip in QuickTime, and see if the audio plays there. If so, Save the clip in QuickTime as a DV clip, and that ought to save the sound correctly, too. (The audio settings should be set as 48 kHz.)
Sometimes a STILL frame at the very start of a movie corrupts the beginning (..possibly audio too; can't remember..) so if the very first item in your movie is a still frame, put a bit - any bit - of movie in front of that, just to 'kick start' iMovie as a movie player, instead of as a still picture player!
These audio problems sometimes happen if the video has been recorded - in the camcorder - as "12-bit" or "32 kHz" audio. iMovie prefers audio recorded as 16-bit or 48 kHz audio. If you have your camcorder handy, and playing the clips in QuickTime (see above) doesn't help, try setting the camcorder's audio settings to 16-bit/48kHz, then exporting (.."Sharing"..) those clips back to the camcorder, then re-importing them. That just might fix it.
I thought that Matti Haveri had an answer to this problem, but I've just searched thro' his replies in iMHD and in iM3/4 but can't find any reference.
Perhaps he'll come and explain further if you call him.. put both index fingers to your head, and say "Matti Haveri, Matti Haveri.."