Opening an imovie file

Question

I'm using final cut, and have been asked to help an african relief organization on a project created in imovie. But when I try to open the .imovieproject files, i can load the clips on the plane, but have no edited files.
I could export the .mov files, using quicktime pro, and load that into finalcut, but i can't separate tracks. When I try to load the .imovieproject files, it crashes final cut.
Am I not seeing the final edited files?
Thanks anyone.

Answer 1

However, when I load the IMovieProjectFile that was given to me, it again loads all the clips (453) of them, but doesn't create a timeline.
First, start with a pristine copy of the project as completed by the monk. If there's nothing on the timeline of the project you see now AND all the clips are in the Clips pane, something major has probably gone wrong. Normally the author would NOT have moved everything from the Timeline to the Clips pane.
That can happen, however, if the iMovie project file was inappropriately emptied at some stage by corruption, or by user error. (Emptying the trash in iMovie 2/3/4 can cause such corruption.)
When there's clips in the Media folder which iMovie doesn't recognize as the project opens -- called strays -- iMovie offers to place them in the Clips pane. When you next save, that's where they stay. If the project file is empty when it opens, all the clips in the Media folder are considered strays.
When you save, iMovie automatically updates the project.mov (the movie with the same name as your project) to reflect the new timeline.
So if all the clips are now in the Clips pane and the project.mov is empty (when played in QT player), most likely a major screw-up has occurred. My guess is you should start over with a pristine copy.
If the pristine copy has all its clips in the Clips pane too, then you have no choice but to rebuild it from those Clips. But that may not be possible.
Note that the clips in the Clips pane do not necessarily represent the clips as edited by the monk. If they were once stray clips that iMovie moved to the Clips pane, they are the SOURCE FILES of his clips, not the clips themselves. Each source file may support one clip or many clips, and those clip(s) may reside anywhere in the project. (Not necessarily contiguous.) That means it would be virtually impossible for you to reconstruct the project with those files.
And one finaly question, in the Audio Waveforms folder are .aiff.snp files and m4a.snp and m4a.wvf files. What are they? I can't seem to make them play or import them.
Those are files that iMovie uses to draw a waveform of audio clips in the project. They can be ignored. iMovie builds them on its own.
Stepping back for a moment... It's not clear to me why iMovie is being used to prepare clips for Final Cut. If the goal is to import files from the project's Media folder to Final Cut, that probably won't work. Since a source file may support multiple clips located anywhere in the project, they can't be used for that purpose. (The clips will arrive jumbled in Final Cut.)
If clips are on the Timeline where they should be, my guess is the best way to get the iMovie project clips into Final Cut is to export the iMovie project to a Full Quality DV movie that you import to Final Cut, or import the project's project.mov into Final Cut. Then everything arrives in the proper order. If necessary, split the movie in Final Cut.
Karl