!! Projects VANISHED. Complete iMovie failure. Genius Bar at a loss. HELP!!

Question

I bought a brand new iMac 2.4 Ghz two weeks ago, SPECIFICALLY so I could "upgrade" to imovie 08 and cut movies of my son. iMovie worked FLAWLESSLY for the first 10 days, no problems whatsoever. I created several projects, using video clips from my iPhoto (these thumbnails all loaded seemlessly from the start. I use a Canon Powershot SD900 and the video clips are amazing in resolution, 5 times better than any camcorder video, hence I was ONLY working from iPhoto video clips from my digital still camera (I have a lot of them - 45 Gs in my iPhoto). Anyway, opened iMovie an hour after working in it previously, and 'POOF' nearly all of my projects were gone. In addition, everything was completely grayed out, clips wouldn't load, iMovie frozen. Called Apple care and tried clearing my chache, etc. No luck. Took it to the Benius Bar and (long story short, after 2 days in genius bar) they transfered all my user files onto ANOTHER brand new iMAC and now I have two (out of 9) projects 'recovered' but iMovie freezes and acts like its on drugs. Can't edit. Can't open a new project. Total Movie failure. Useless. The Genius bar is at a loss. Says the total iMovie failure may be because I have a single piece of data (a video clip, a photo, even a song) that is corrupted. What the @#$%? Somebody PLEASE help!

Answer 1

Sorry to learn that you have not been able to find a solution.
I knew which clip was corrupted because it was the only one that would not permit any editing. Fortunately, it was that easy.
If you had just one iMovie that you were working on, and you could open new projects, you could copy/paste half of the movie to a new project and see which half plays well. Then with the problem half, copy/paste another half to a new project and see if you can keep repeating the process until you isolate the corrupted clip. It is tedious, but works. However, you said you could not even open a new project in iMovie, so I don't think this solution will be helpful in your situation.
You will probably need a radical approach and will just have to start over. It will be a lot of work to redo several projects, but well worth the time if it works. Look at how much time you have spent trying to recover/fix/figure out what is going on. Plus, you have all your video clips, and the second construction usually goes faster because you remember how you had it the first time.
So, unless the Genius bar guys have a better solution, I would trash all your Movie projects and files, reinstall iMovie, and start over with the creation of your iMovies. Be sure to repair permissions before and after reinstallation. You should then have a pristine iMovie app, so you should be able to open it without problems.
If all is ok so far, reimport the video clips, but do just one at a time. That way, you will see which, if any, one of them is a problem clip. You may never find out exactly what went wrong, and if you don't completely start over, you may run into this problem again and again.