Recover iSight video from crashed iMovie

Question

I recently set up to capture video from iSight in iMovie to record all day (in order to catch my landlord snooping!) but in the middle of the day iMovie crashed!
When I came home it just said it encountered an error and quit, and gave options to relaunch, etc. I found the error log and it said that it crashed at 1 PM.
I can't seem to find any video, not even in the trash, even though when I first started capturing it said 1900 minutes, and now it says about 1500 minutes, and since I started recording at about 7 AM, it's consistent with the time that it crashed...
Anyone have ideas where it could be??? Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello nrmayhew
If you really recorded 400 minutes, you have store approximately 87 GB somewhere on your hard disk. Because video files take up a lot of space on hard disks, finding or recovering that space is important.
My first guess is that your clip is written to disk but may not have been saved with a file name due to the crash error. If the clip was saved, you should be able to find it with Spotlight. It may have a file names like clip-2008-05-06 10;22;04.mov where the numbers are the date and time of the recording. You can search for "clip-" or all ".mov" files, although, depending on what you have stored on your disk, the latter may return an unmanageably large number of hits.
If you cannot find it in Spotlight, look manually in your Movies / iMovie Events / Event Name 5-6-08 folder where the numbers are the month, day, and year of the event you created.
Alternatively, you might be able to find and open the project in the Movies / iMovie Projects folder. If you can open it, you can see the file names iMovie is using for the long clip. That may make finding the project event folder or clips simpler. If you chose other than default names for your project or events, substitute the name you used in the folder names above. If you do find the clip, review the saved info to see how much, if any, you want to keep.
If you cannot find the captured video anywhere, I suggest that you repair the disk that you use to store iMovie files you are capturing. Repairing the disk may free up the unidentified file space.
After you have your disk space accounted for and/or repaired, you may want to reconsider which application you use for security monitoring. If one of the following applications meets your needs it might be preferable to iMovie because these are developed specifically for their security monitoring features. Moreover, they do not capture such huge DV (digital video) files during extended monitoring as iMovie does.
• EvoCam
• SecuritySpy
• KeyCamX
• Periscope by Freeverse
Check the specifications of each application for the features you need, compatibility with your equipment, and system requirements.
Of course, if iMovie is the app you need, use it. However, be sure you have plenty of free space on the hard disk you use to store the 13 GB of file space that DV generates each hour you record.
EZ Jim
PowerBook 1.67 GHz w/Mac OS X (10.4.11) G5 DP 1.8 w/Mac OS X (10.5.2)  External iSight