Yellow triangle and exclamation mark - video clips gone

One of the clips may be incompatible with iMovie 08. Try again, and after the insertion of a few clips, find them in the Finder and use Quick Look to see how the file appears. Add more and check again.

I hope that helps.

I am having the exact same problem as expressed above, and I know that my clips are compatible because my video was working fine the last time I was working on it, a few days ago. I figured that I'd come back this weekend to finalize it, only to find that the video clips are missing in the project, and all have the yellow triangle.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

Great news! After some browsing around, I located the problem, and now my movie project is fixed!

As it turns out, videos that are located in iPhoto are referenced based on the Event that they belong to, which means that if you change the name of the Event that the picture belongs to then iMovie will no longer be able to find your picture. (This is also why the clips appear in the lower section of iMovie, because they are still there, just in a renamed or merged event.)

I was able to fix the problem very easily by renaming my event back to the original name, and then after closing and restarting iMovie all the nasty little yellow triangles were gone and all my clips were back as if they'd never left.

This may or may not help, but for me, to make sure that I got the event name correct, I found the movie file (which was in "Movies/iMovie Projects") and then right mouse clicked and selected "Show Package Contents" so that I could see what was in my project, and then opened the "Project" file, which had the names listed in it. Hope that helps!

Trigby

One possibility is to make a duplicate of project file and rename it with .doc ending. Then you can open it as very messy text but the old file names can still be read. Anybody please mail a better solution if you know it.

You can also open a Project file for viewing by finding the Project in the finder. Then right-click (or control-click) on it and select "Open With". Choose Text Edit, or your favorite text editor. If you have BBEdit, that should handle the hexadecimal numbers nicely so there is less gibberish.

You should be able to see the file names and paths that iMovie expects to find. Be careful not to change anything unless you know what you are doing. It might be safer to do this with a copy.

Hi, thanks for that helpful hint, I have the same problem after I reorganized my iPhoto Library and created new events with better names.

But actually I don't want to change the names of the events back, just to make my imovie projects working again. So has anybody tried to change the name in the project file? If I open the file 'project' in an text-editor (tried several), and then change the name of the event in the path of a file (and really nothing else), iMovie will doesn't recgonize the project at all. As soon as I replace the file 'project' with the original version, iMovie will display it again...

You are wonderful--thanks for the very complete explanation and solution on how to fix this issue. You saved me a LOT of work!

hi. how were you able to open the "project" document. Mine wont open?
thanks!

You are a freakin genius! Thanks for this amazing tip. You saved me a ton a time.