Saving imovie projects

I want to save my imovie projects on an external hard drive. I have version 10.0.3. I can't find a "save as" function. Any suggestions?

See: http://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.0/#mov3fa25bae7
under “Copy or move projects, events, or clips between libraries or storage devices”
Geoff

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Can Quicktime Updates interfere with saved iMovie projects?

Hello.
I'm just about to do an update to the latest Quicktime and I wondered if these updates can cause any problems with iMovie projects that have been made and saved on my computer with older Quicktime versions?
Thanks
Rich

Thanks Bengt,
But how about after a project is fully completed and burned to DVD but still remaining stored on the computer as a final iMovie project. In case you want to burn it again or just play it on the computer, will that original iMovie on the computer be confused by a newer Quicktime Update? I have all mine still saved as both disc images and also the original project. I know a disc image will not be affected but I was curious about the original project?
Rich

Saving imovie projects in itunes

I've created an imovie project from the app on my ipad2 and saved it in itunes but now my macbookpro won't open it in imovie from the itunes account. How can I use the project saved in itunes on other devices? Is there a way to burn a dvd of the project from the macbook pro?

iMovie projects are actually "packages". These packages appear as if they are one single document, but in fact they're more like a folder. If you right-click or control-click on an iMovie project, you'll see an option to "show package contents". Then, inside the project you'll see all the individual files. Would you want to browse through the individual files in that folder with Front Row? Probably not. All of the organization and editing you've done in iMovie is not reflected in the individual files there. While this organization method works for iMovie, it doesn't really help Front Row. To play music, Front Row opens iTunes in the background. To play movies/videos, Front Row plays the files through QuickTime. It might be nice to have an option to view iMovie projects by having iMovie open in the background. You might send Apple some Mac OS X feedback about that option:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
-Doug

Saving iMove projects for later edit by PC users

I've been converting a lot of VHS tapes to DVD for friends and family using iMovie and iDVD. Lately, I've been getting asked if I can simply hand over the digitized files to them for editing on their computers with their video editing software. What's the best way to save an iMovie project to disc for people with PCs (or Macs) so that they can edit and create their own DVD?

As Karsten said, the most foolproof method is to give them tape.
I don't know what kind of video files PC editing apps can import. Looking from the Mac side, a DV-stream (.dv) would be the most convenient format because iMovie can readily export it. The downside is that all scenes would be stuffed in a single file (unless the user exported each scene separately) and it would be up to the PC app/user to re-split the scenes into clips.
Another tempting format would be a DV-encoded .avi. But then you should remember that due to a bug in iMovie HD, it can't properly export it.
http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/iMovieHD_6_bugs.html#expertsettings
So you should then use a workaround and use apps like MPEG Streamclip to export the iMovie project as a DV-AVI.
http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/SVCDon_a_Macintosh.html#imovie_3rdparty
The latest MPEG Streamclip beta has a Save as... -command which AFAIK should wrap a .dv file as DV-AVI (choose AVI from the pop-up).
...but as I said, I don't know how the PC apps handle these formats.

Saved iMovie projects not showing up in iDVD's Media compartment

Hello Everyone,
I recently created 2 projects in iMovie. After saving them at full quality they are showing up in my Movies folder, however, when I begin an iDVD project neither is showing up in iDVD's Media compartment (under "Custom"). I'm baffled. Can anyone out there shed some light on this? Perhaps I am saving them incorrectly?

Figured it out...Went under "File > Import > Movies" in iDVD. The movies showed up when I did that. Still don't understand why they don't show up under "Media." Everything worked beautifully after that.

My saved imovie project freezes on playback

This is very annoying,
I have been making i movie projects that are a mixture of short video clips and also photographs. I make the photos into slideshows in i movie and intersperse these with the short video clilps.
Anyway I have shared/saved the movie to quicktime and it freezes during playback but the audio keeps on going.
Here is the process I go through to save my movie...
Share>Quicktime>Expert Settings>Movie to QuickTime Movie.
When ever I have a mixture of photos and short videos it never saves without freeaing on playback. However I can save successfully to MPEG-4 and AVI but I am not satisfied with the quality of these and would like to save as a QuickTime movie as I want to be able to put it on a DVD.
I am exasperated!
I don't think it is anything to do with space on my hard drive as there is plenty and this was happening even when my mac was brand new!
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Thanks for your help Richard. I have exported the movie to idvd and that works, the thing is I want to be able to add other movies from i movie into the same dvd.
For example if I export my movie (of pics and videos) to idvd then try to export another it gets sent to a new idvd project and no the one I had previously exported to.
Am I making sense?
Maybe I am being stupid and there IS a simple way around this.
I tried making the photo slideshows in i photo then adding them to the movie project but the same problem arises - if I save it as a quicktime movie it freezes on playback.

IMovie Project from External Hard Drive not Opening?

Please help!!
Fairly new to MACs, iMovie and iDVD, I didn't have a clear understanding of how saving iMovie projects worked. Reading various tutorials, I thought I had a clear understanding of how they work. Apparently not with my recent frustration with iMovie.
I created several iMovie Projects but needed more space in order to make more projects for my internship thus I did what I thought was common sense -- get an external hard drive.
I exported iMovie projects into my user account and from there, dragged the saved projects into an external hard drive and then deleted the iMovie projects from my user account.
However, when I needed to retrieve these projects, I simply turned on my hard drive and clicked on them to open. However, whenever I tried opening them, they wouldn't open. Is it because I didn't export them to the hard drive in the first place?
What I don't understand is why iMovie is not opening or recognizing the saved iMovie projects from the external hard drive when the size and kind clearly indicate that it should open with iMovie automatically.
What is the proper way of saving my iMovie projects and events so that I can always have access to whenever I need to open up an old project or simply edit?

Freeing up space on your Mac hard drive in iMovies ’08.
The application iMovie ‘08 has two main libraries displayed in the iMovie window: Events and Projects. Events are the main imports from your video camera, say. These files are big and you have the option to save them on an external hard drive and so iMovie knows to find them there. Projects are your editing instructions like what clips you want and where. The files are small and you save them on your Mac hard drive. They are NOT the clips only signposts where to find them (in Events on your external hard drive). You can move Projects to your external hard drive as back-up but iMovie will not find them there. If you then delete Projects from your Mac, iMovie can no longer make use of them unless you manually export them back into iMovie from your external hard drive. See Apple Article HT1026 iMovie '08: Moving iMovie footage to another drive (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1026). Here the external hard disk is used for moving Projects from one computer to another and, by implication, back to the source computer.
Sharing the projects to iTunes for syncing with Apple TV creates (publishes) movies that take up the same amount of space on your Mac as the source Projects. You can still burn DVDs in iDVD using the iTunes Movies as your Media so provided you have iMovie Projects backed up on your external hard drive you can delete them from your Mac and just use the iTunes Movies (for Apple TV and iDVD). In addition, publishing iMovie Projects in iTunes for syncing to Apple TV results in these files being duplicated in both Movies/iMovies Sharing/iTunes AND in iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies so delete them from here and get even more GBs back! Tell iTunes in Advanced not to save these iTunes published movies anymore in order to stop further duplication ocurring.

Why can't I open my iMovie projects?

Hello!
I have upgraded to the new iMovie, but I have had this problem before too. So I have an External Hard Drive (It's called "Seagate") that I have saved iMovie projects for a while now because I needed more space on my Mac. But I can't open the projects anymore? I can't even click on them. It just showes me this:
Can anyone help me to understand how to open it? Or is it impossible and the project is gone forever? Please help, I would be so thankfull.

Did you update your iMovie 9 projects from within imovie 10?
See: http://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.0/#mov902ad0c31
I'm puzzled where your screen shot comes from. Top left on the iMovie 10 window should display "LIBRARIES", followed by"All Events" and "All Projects". Below this there should be an entry for each library.
Geoff.

Saving and backing up iMovie projects

Here is a question I never dreamed I'd be asking: how do you save an iMovie "project"? Since 1984, every Mac application has had "Save" under the "File" menu where you could name and save your file. "Save often" became the main way to avoid disaster in the event of a application malfunction. Idiocy reigns at Apple; saving is no longer possible. Now I know iMovie is supposed to auto-save, but really...the Web is full of disaster stories of crashed apps and lost files.
Anyway, I want to do several things: 1.) I want to save my project so that I can open it at a later date and work on it again. 2.) Related to #1, I want to start a new project, confident that my old project is still accessible. 3.) I want to do twice daily back-ups of my working project so that if iMovie crashes I don't lose more than a half day of work.
All of this has become almost automatic in my nearly 25 years of working on Macs. File saving and backing up are one of the few constants that, until iMovie, were unchanged. Apple, in a regrettable display of poor decisionmaking, has abandoned this tried and true procedure. I really hope I'm missing something simple and I have to eat my words. Can anyone help me save my files? Thanks. By the way, no Time Machine here. I want to save these files manually.

Hi:
Michael Brown12 wrote:
Anyway, I want to do several things: 1.) I want to save my project so that I can open it at a later date and work on it again.
Quit iMovie and open it later when you want to restart your project.
2.) Related to #1, I want to start a new project, confident that my old project is still accessible.
In iMovie, menu File > New. It will open a dialog box that allows you to name your new project and set the aspect ratio you will use.
You can see your old projects by clicking the "Project Library" button at the upper left corner of the iMovie window. It will show you all your projects. You can duplicate or rename any project, as you wish, in the library. If you want to edit an older project, select it in the library and then click the button "Edit Project" in the upper left corner of the iMovie window.
3.) I want to do twice daily back-ups of my working project so that if iMovie crashes I don't lose more than a half day of work.
iMovie store the projects and project events in the folder Home Folder username > Movies > iMovie Projects and Home Folder username > Movies > iMovie Events. Feel free to back up those folders as often as you'd like. I would incorporate some kind of naming convention that allow you to readily see the date/time of your backup, but that is up to you. If you crash for some reason, you can restore the contents of the folders from your backups.
All of this has become almost automatic in my nearly 25 years of working on Macs. File saving and backing up are one of the few constants that, until iMovie, were unchanged. Apple, in a regrettable display of poor decisionmaking, has abandoned this tried and true procedure.
Well, hmmmmmmm. Most mission critical software that I know, such as QuickBooks Pro, or Filemaker Pro do not have save commands, as I guess the designers feel that it is safer to have the program do the auto-save after every change the operator makes than leaving it up to the operator to remember.
Even Final Cut Pro, Apple's flagship edit software, has built in auto-save *in addition to* the manual save commands. I have my auto-save in FCP set to every two minutes.
Hope this helps.

IMovie and when saving a project

When i save an imovie project, and i look into the movies folder, it seems like it is archiving and saving another copy of the movie file. It adds a tilda ( ~ ) to the file name.
Can anyone help and explain why it does this and also a possible fix to stop it from happening again

It is the file that is read when you select Revert to Saved from the File menu.
Actually, it's a bit sneakier than that. Revert to Saved reverts to the file that does NOT have the tilde. It reverts to the last-saved version of the project. When we Revert, the changes we made since last saving are discarded.
The tilde file is the PREVIOUSLY-saved version of the project, the project as it was BEFORE we last saved. Only rarely — I've seen it happen just one time when opening a project — iMovie offers to restore the project to that PREVIOUSLY-saved state. When opening the project it identified a problem with the project file and offered to rescue the project by opening the project as it was earlier.
I've never seen anyone mention that here, but it happened to me once.
Karl

I saved an iMovie to DVD and now I can't find the original working files in iMovie Project library to make additional edits. What happened to the files? Thx!

I saved an iMovie to DVD and now I can't find the original working files in iMovie Project library to make additional edits. What happened to the files? Thx!

Did you do the moving of the image file in the Finder or do you have a reference library as asked by Larry? In either case moving the files is a recipe for disaster as you've found out. You must either move the files back to their original locations or try to get those photos back into iPhoto as follows:
1 - Find the folder you moved the files into and COPY it to the Desktop.
2 - in iPhoto delete the photos that you're having the problems with as you normally would even though you can't see see them. Also delete all the photos that are in the folder you moved the other files into.
3 - drag the folder on the Desktop into iPhoto to import them as one event. If you get a duplicate warning I'd let it import the duplicate and use Duplicate Annihilator to find them so you can cull out the duplicate you don't want.
Other than that you might have to start over from scratch as follows:
Creating a new library while preserving the Events from the original library.
1 - Move the existing library folder to the desktop
2 - Open the library package like this.
3 - Launch iPhoto and, when asked, select the option to create a new library.
4 - Drag the Originals folder from the iPhoto Library on the desktop into the open iPhoto window.
OT

Saving an imovie project to DVD that can later be re-edited?

I have many imovie jobs saved on 4 external hard drives. Problem is I am running out of space. Is there any way to save a completed imovie project onto a DVD that can still be fully edited?
Thanks, Beth

Yes, you can always save files onto a DVD as a data disk using Disk Utility or something like Toast to burn the DVD. Of course since projects (video footage) tends to be a lot larger than a DVD blank, you might have to manually break up the project onto several DVDs, then reimport them later rebuilding that project folder again as it was.
Patrick

Saving iMovie 4 projects on an external hard drive

I'm starting the ambitious project of copying our family videos from 8mm tapes to iMovie to eventually making DVDs. since I don't have much disk space on my iBook, my plan is to put the iMovie files on an external hard drive & work from there. Here are the system specs:
Camera: Sony DCR-TRV520 (Digital 8)
Computer: iBook 800 MHz PowerPC G3, 28GB hard drive, 5GB available
OS 10.3.9
iMovie 4
Hard Drive: LaCie Eternet Disk mini 300GB (150GB available) format: Mac OS Extended
Problem: Open a new iMovie project on the external hard drive. Start to import the footage. After one or 2 seconds, the image freezes and import aborts.
Solution: Open a new project on the computer. Footage imports fine.
Problem: Can only import 1/2 hour or so of video before I'm in trouble. Files WAY too big for my itty bitty iBook!
Solution: Make a new iMovie file on the external hard drive & copy the clips from the computer to the hard drive. (this takes TONS of time!)
Problem: Open movie file on the LaCie. Import the clips. Clips show up but won't play!
Question: Is there any better way to do this? Why won't the project work on the external hard drive?
I teach video production at a high school and have done this many times on newer iMacs (iLife 6). We can't save every project on the computers, so certain projects I'll copy to an external hard drive. I've never had a problem working on an iMovie project from the hard drive. I considered uploading my movies on the computers at school, however then I'm stuck with iMovie 6 files on the hard drive and iMovie 4 at home.
Any suggestions -- other than get a newer computer?

Importing new footage from a video camera and working with iMovie with footage already on the computer are two completely different things.
At school, do you actually IMPORT video from digital camcorders directly to the USB drive as you said you were doing at home?
Because while you can indeed work on iMovie projects off a USB drive if you are not actually importing video, the whole importing process from a Firewire camcorder is sort of a streaming video type transfer and Firewire is used because it has a mode for this type of transfer. USB, on the other hand, can not import video from a camcorder straight to a USB drive reliably because there is way too much CPU overhead associated with USB transfers and it therefore can not keep up with the "streaming" video coming out of the camcorder.
If you want to find out more details, do a search for "isochronous" with Firewire. Firewire uses type types of transfers. Asynchronous transfer which is like USB uses where you transfer data, wait for the CPU to respond, then transfer the next chunk of data. Video transfer uses and isochronous process where, to put it very simply, the camcorder starts spitting out chunks of footage with a checksum and the receiving end receives it, calculates a checksum and if the checksums match, stores the chunk of data. If they don't match, the data is discarded and it starts to receive the next chunk of data. There is no ability to resend failed data so you get dropped frames in your footage.
If you import via Firewire from Camcorder to Mac then directly to an external USB drive, the transfer from Mac to USB drive will be too slow as the CPU and drive have to start doing their "did you get it?", "Ya I got it, send another/No, send again please", "OK here it comes" routine while in the meantime the camcorder to Mac Firewire transfer is just pumping out data at a fixed rate. Once the USB connection falls behind the process aborts.
Patrick

Can't retrieve iMovie project saved to DVD for storage and editing.

When I save my iMovie project to DVD for storage and possible future editing, I cannot retrieve it from the DVD. I get the message, "The project could not be opened, bacuase the disk is full, the folder is locked, or the folder permissions are incorrect..." How do I remedy that?

the folder is locked
iMovie projects won't work with locked volumes (such as a DVD!). So you must first copy the project to the HD.

Importing clips from iMovie project (they keep ending up in the trash)

I have never tried to import other clips from another iMovie project before and I just tried it yesterday. This is what I did:
-I went into the other project and clicked on each individual clip from that project that I wanted (one at a time).
-I copied that clip and then saved it to the desktop
-From there I copied those clips to my external drive (which holds the new project that I am working on
-I then opened up the new project in iMovie
-I went to File<Import
-I selected the clips that I had copied over to the external drive
-I imported them
-They all showed up fine, they played fine and I was able to edit them and put them into the time line as well
The problem I face though is after I save the project and exit, the next time I open the project, each of those clips are missing and have been placed in the trash
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks ahead of time for your help!

It sounds like something may be preventing iMovie from properly saving the project on the external drive. The drive format may be wrong, or third-party software might be causing conflicts. More here:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1852869#1852869
Another possibility is that you are opening the wrong project file saved inside the iMovie 5 project. If your project was originally an iMovie 4 project converted to iMovie 5 that's an easy mistake to make. More here:
http://discussions.apple.com/click.jspa?searchID=-1&messageID=1971832
Note that the copy/export/import routine you used can be simplified enormously. iMovie 5 lets us Copy and Paste clips much more simply. To copy clips from Project A to Project B, open Project A, select all the clips you want copied to Project B, choose Edit > Copy, open Project B, move the playhead where you want to place the clips, and Paste. iMovie will import all the files that support those clips from Project A to Project B. Note that it imports the entire file for the clip, not just the clip itself. That's so the clip inherits all the non-destructive editing features it had in Project A.
To avoid Project B becoming unnecessarily large, it's important to Copy and Paste all the clips you want together. If you copy two clips at the same time that share the same file iMovie imports their source file just one time. But if you Copy and Paste two clips that share the same source file separately, iMovie imports the same file twice.
Karl

Saving imovie projects

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