Lost Video project

Question

I  have been working on a project for several weeks, but on booting up this morning i find the named project missing although all the other projects and event clips were there. I looked in the trash, I looked back over several days in Time Machine which backs up every hour, I searched in Finder under the project name.  Nothing ! Yet everything else was there on a day by day basis.  I find this totally weird as nothing else is missing, just all the many week's work in putting all this together. I can not recall doing anything untoward and have worked steadily on a repetitive process daily.  How can something just vanish even in the external hard drive backup ? Does anyone have any suggestions ?   I can obviously start the whole project again, but the weeks of work that went into it will be frustrating, and surely it must be somewhere.

Answer 1

Hi CMBP,
Sorry it's taken a few days to get back to you. I've been busy re-editing and exporting the project I had "lost", among other things. All is well now. I did most of the work in Final Cut Pro X but then had trouble with the background rendering and FCP X freezing. So, had to remove some effects, titles and transitions, then finish the job in iMovie. My "client" (family friend) is very happy with the final product (a 50th wedding anniversary). So all's well that ends well.
Earlier you asked about Final Cut Pro X and mentioned Adobe Premiere as the preferred choice of a camera store guy. As you appear to be fairly new to video editing, my advice would be to persevere with iMovie. It's quite an easy program to use once you get the hang of how things work. Your earlier reading of information in the links I provided should help with this. Final Cut Pro X is an amazing piece of work, but there is quite a learning curve, being far more complex than iMovie. You can move up to this once you feel comfortable with iMovie. FCP X has a similar interface to iMovie '11, but there is lots more going on under the hood! I can't comment on Adobe Premiere as I've never used it.
I'm still confused as to what you've done with your iMovie Events (not to mention Projects!). If you have moved them out of the iMovie Events folder in the Finder, they must be returned there, otherwise iMovie will not recognize them. One way of doing this is to drag Event clips into iMovie's Drop Box. When iMovie is next opened, you will be given the opportunity to import these clips into an iMovie Event (either a new one or an existing one). I've inserted below the Help article from iMovie Help (italicised and in quotes):
"Import video from iMovie Drop Box
When you import video into iMovie the first time, iMovie creates a folder on your hard disk called iMovie Drop Box.
You can copy or save video files to this drop box without opening iMovie. To find the drop box folder on your hard disk, go to your home folder/Movies/iMovie Events. In the Finder window, the home folder has the house icon to the left of its name.
Every time you launch iMovie, it checks if there are new files in the drop box and if so, it asks you if you want to import them into iMovie. The drop box is a convenient way to save files to your computer quickly without having to import them into iMovie right away.
To import files from iMovie Drop Box:
Open iMovie.iMovie detects if you have new items in the drop box that haven’t yet been imported.
In the dialog that opens, do any of the following:
To add the files to an existing Event, select “Add to existing Event” and then choose an options from the pop-up menu.
To create a new Event with the files, select “Create new Event” and then type a name in the text field.
If you’re importing HD video, select “Optimize video,” and then choose Full or Large from the pop-up menu.
Click Import.
The files now appear in iMovie, within the Event you specified at the time the files were imported."
You said in your last post: "I tried  Camera archive and all I get is my Sony camera which I don't understand. I tried imovie iOS project and imovie HD project. What is the difference because none of them enabled me to import anything either from projects or events."
Camera Archive is a very important feature in iMovie that allows you to archive the original footage from your camera. It's essential to do this so that you can always go back to the archive if things go amiss with the Events in iMovie and you no longer have the clips on your camera. The clips are stored in an Archive folder in their original AVCHD format. These can be imported at any time to an iMovie Event and will be converted to the AIC format, ready for editing in a Project (as I described in an earlier post here). To import from a Camera Archive, from iMovie's menu select File > Import ⇒ Camera Archive then navigate to the Archive folder to select the clips for import. You can get more information from iMovie Help - search for "Make a back-up copy (archive) of the contents of your camcorder".
Regarding iMovie iOS projects - these relate to clips taken with an iPhone or iPad that have been edited in those devices using the iMovie for iOS app. The edited project can be imported to iMovie on your Mac for further work if desired. An iMovie HD project is a project that has been edited on an earlier version of iMovie (either iMovie HD - version 5, or iMovie HD - version 6). Both these versions work quite differently, and have a completely different interface, to the later versions (iMovie '08 through iMovie '11). The earlier versions (up to iMovie HD 6) are no longer supported by Apple, but Apple had the foresight to allow the earlier projects to be imported to the current version (although in a limited form).
Hope all this helps to clarify things for you. Please post back if you need more information or help.
John