Reorganizing Events in my Events Library

Question

I am studying the iMovie '11 Help to figure out *how to re-organize my Events Library*. One lesson is How to move a clip from one Event to another. It says:
+To move video clips from one Event to another:+
+In the Event Library, click to select the Event with the video you want to move.+
+In the Event browser, select the clip or clips you want to move.+
+Drag the clips to the name of the other Event in the Event Library to which you want to move them.+
+Release the mouse button when you see the name of the Event highlighted.+
+Click OK.+
_My question is_, *Can I create a brand new folder in the Events Library and move clips from various other events into that new folder?* I ask because the Help explanation explains that we can move clips from one folder to another (existing) folder but it does not mention the possibility of creating a totally brand new folder.
Example: In five folders/Events, I have footage of various themes: (1) My dog watching ucks in the pool, (2) Inside the house new furniture, (3) My dog inside the house, (4) Baby birds in a nest growing up and leaving the nest. (5) Children laughing in bed.
There are five Events with a jumble of all of those themes. In this case, I will end up with five folders and five themes, so I will have to only rename the folders, BUT *what about the cases where I need more folders? Is it ok to create a new folder for those clips taken from other Events?*
I ask because I have been told over and over that iMovie is a very sensitive program that doesn't want us to be fiddling with the contents, or that we have to fiddle with them only while working in iMovie. I want to make sure that what I described is a legitimate kind of fiddling around, and not one which will lose me footage and audio as happened to me about ten years ago (after which I quit iMovie for a long time.)
-L
Message was edited by: Lorna from Hawaii

Answer 1

Hi Lorna,
for quite a while, I'm watching with admiration and a good portion of amusement (no offense meant!) your tenacity to win the struggle with movie-making in general and iM in special ...
in this case, we have to get less 'practical' advice, but more 'concept thinking':
in real-life, people like to store things in drawers - there's a drawer for socks, another for shirts. What if you need red socks for a red shirt? you have to search manually in both drawers.
now, computers: since iTunes, Apple tries to teach people to use tags: there's a big basket with socks AND shirts, but each has tags, (sock, red, wool, old, holes ... ). A computer is much faster than you to organize this mess: one click 'red' and you instantly get any red socks and red shirts!
back to movie making:
what you want is drawers (=folders), you can manually organize. The Big Brother of iMovie, FinalCut call them bins.
but you'll find in iM a knob with a key on it - KEYWORDS (tags)! it allows to tag each clip, or part of, with as much keywords you like ... hmm, you need.
the better you apply keywords to clips (and iM allows to use your very own keywords, adding 'dogs', 'birds', 'socks ...), the better - and faster - you'll find material for your Projects!
it is very different to real-life, and we do this discussion with ANY 'switcher', who doesn't trust that concept when importing their 45GBs/thousand 'drawers' music Libraries ... or, same in iPhoto.
face recognition is such a thing ... = I have to organize thousands of pics from my son's soccer team - the computer identifies in seconds each member of the team; a click later, I get all stills showing Player #2.... that is MUCH easier than manually searching in dozens of folders (2009? 2010? April? December? The Big Match? Training? ... )
... spend some time off the computer with a pencil and some sheets of paper. what are YOUR keywords? what are the properties, you're most searching of? make a list of your keywords. consider future usage too. and, you can add additional keywords later. keep it simple & short - after finding all 'birds' clips, you can search for the robin manually ...
summary:
Events are meant for a 'time' structure, not content.
Use Keywords.
have fun ...