Trying to retrieve old project with no luck

Question

I made a short movie (2 minutes) in iMovie last month, shared it to the Media Browser and then did the final production in iDVD. I burned a few discs and all was well. In order to free up space, I moved the project from iMovie to an external disc. (I did, however, leave all the unedited clips in the Event Library.)
So now I want to make a small change--I wanted to change the music that plays as soon as the disc starts, and I wanted to change the picture theme there. Since I had already published the project to iDVD, I figured it would still be there--in iDVD--even though I had taken it out of iMovie and put in on the external disc.
No such luck. It no longer exists in iDVD (though the events are there). I retrieved the project from the external drive, but am not sure what to do with it now. When I click on the "iDVD project" file that supposedly contain my movie, I get an error message saying "The following files could not be found:" and then it gives a very long code ending in Video, and another ending in Audio.
I'm hoping that somehow I can re-import the Project back to iMovie, or somehow share it with browser again. Anything but do the movie all over again. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Hello, James,
An iDVD project should be thought of as a container of 'aliases' or pointers to the media files used in the project. The project does not actually contain those files. Simply, when you open an iDVD project, use it or burn it, iDVD goes to the actual media locations and lets you edit for the project, or it encodes the media data for burning.
If you move, rename, change or delete ANY of the files used in the project, iDVD cannot locate them. Even if you put everything back where it was, iDVD sometimes still cannot locate the files. You can locate them manually if iDVD asks for them. When you get that 'long code ending in Video' and you know which video file that is, presumably the iMovie that is now on your external drive, you can direct iDVD to it. Same for that audio file.
If you cannot do that, or if you try and it does not work for this project, you will need to recreate the project by making a new iDVD project.
Also, although you can edit an iDVD project if you have not changed any of the media files, if you make any changes in a movie used in the file....even just correcting a typo in a title, iDVD will not burn the movie properly, even though you may receive the message that iDVD detected that 'assets' have been changed and asks if you want to update. There is a bug in iDVD8/9 that causes the burn to be incorrect, especially if you have chapter markers. The only time I was able to make a correction in my movie and have it play properly was a change I made in the last frame of the movie.
If you would like to save your iDVD projects for re-editing, you need to save them as Archive projects so that all the media is saved as well.
If you just want to keep the iDVD project intact for future burning without doing more editing, it is recommended that you do a 'save as disk image' from within the iDVD project. This results in a disk image file that has all the media encoded within it, so that now if you rename, move, change or delete any media from the project, you will still have the ability to burn more DVD disks from the disk image file using Disk Utility.