Woah; my first iMovie '08 project ruined by moving my iPhoto library?

Question

So I made my first project with the new iMovie last night (I actually like it a lot more for making quick movies, but will probably need final cut express to do anything complicated, but I digress...). Finished it, yay, cute little movie, took about an hour to do. All the video came out of my iPhoto library.
So this morning, I notice that my main drive is a little low on space so I moved my iPhoto library (following the iPhoto instructions) to my larger, external drive.
When I fired up iMovie again, it spent an hour regenerating all the video thumbnails, annoying, but dealable.
But now my project video only has the thumbnails. Every clip has a little exclamation point on it, which I assume means it can't find the video clip to back it, which is terribly frustrating since it's still in the same place in the iPhoto library, just in a different place on disk.
So is iMovie writing the absolute file location into the movie project, so if you -ever- move your iPhoto library or change your disk layout your movie becomes useless? That seems like a pretty major oversight. There doesn't seem to be any way to "re-link" the video clips to their new locations or fix this problem. Brilliant.
So I pulled out plutil, and luckily the Project file is a binary plist (scared me for a minute that it was just a binary closed data file). The file locations for the videos are referenced as such:
<string>~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2007/Vacation TX-1/MVI_0565.AVI</string>
So that's a -double- pain. not only is it referencing the absolute library location, it's referencing the -old- location within the library. See, I changed the name of that event in iPhoto from "Vacation TX-1" to just "Oregon Vacation", so now within the library the file's in a different spot as well.
So it seems like, unless I'm missing something, if you use a video from iPhoto you can never reorganize that video in iPhoto or change libraries? That seems like a major fix that's needed.
I'm going to try symlinking the library location to the new one, to see if as long as iMovie can find the library it can sort out the renaming. If that doesn't work, then I guess I'll be manually hacking the plist.
Am I missing an easy and obvious way to do this within iMovie?

Answer 1

So, adding the symlink didn't help, still missing. Upgrading to 7.0.1 didn't help.
Plist surgery did help and brought the project back to life, with one minor quirk, my thumbnails in the video editing window were gone. So the "Thumbnails" file in the bundle is a regular plist...it appears to contain the thumbnails themselves, keyed by the filename. I tried changing those paths to match as well, but that didn't do it. They are the absolute paths, with the "~" for homdir expanded. Since I left the "~" alone in the other file and just symlinked it, I wondered if maybe the resolving was different so I changed it to the absolute path of the movie file, but that didn't work either.
so I have two versions of the project, one with thumbnails but unplayable and unexportable, and another that's playable and exportable but no thumbnails. At least I didn't lose my movie.
Still crossing my fingers that I'm just missing the piece of killer-UI for finding moved video clips. Seems like if the they are switching to a video format that relies entirely on external references, including references to private paths within other programs that the user isn't even supposed to be aware of, there needs to be a tool for fixing them up.
Looking at the files, this doesn't just go for iPhoto videos...it seems also apply to stills (although since those get rendered and included in the project bundle that might not be quite as a big a deal as long as you never want to change them) and music/sound effect files.