My Movie is Gone!!!

Question

Hi there,
I have been working on a video for my parents for the past couple months, and now that I pretty much finished it, I went into iMovie to polish things off and share it with media browser so I could use it in iDVD. But when I opened the file, all the thumbnails showed up with a yellow triangle "caution" sign on the bottom, and when I ran the cursor over it, it said file currently unavailable, and the picture on the thumbnails went black.
The other movies I had made still work, at least the one I had already published. The thumbnails for videos available to use in my movie (I guess I mean in my video library in iTunes) were all there, uncorrupted. I have tried restarting my computer several times, even tried copying the movie and making adjustments to that, but every time the thumbnails go black and when I try to share or export or anything, it says that the unavailable files (as in, my entire movie) are going to show up as a black screen. I'm heartbroken!
Do I have to redo my entire movie or is there a way to save it?

Answer 1

The key is they must be in the exactly the same place that they were when you created the project.
(unless you move it within iMovie)
They must also have the same Event Name (which is also the Folder Name) as when you created the project (although you can change the name within iMovie)
And the clips within the Event must have the same names as when you created the project.
If you have not changed the clip name or event name, you might be able to simply move the folder for this event back to the Movies/iMovie Events folder.
If you think it is more complicated than that, you can open your RCPROJECT file in Movies/iMovie Projects by right-click/Show Package Contents. Then make a copy of the Project file, and open the copy in a text editor that will edit hexadecimal (like BBEDIT, for example).
You should be able to read the paths and filenames where iMovie expects to find the event assets.