where does imovie save the finished project and the original clips?

Users>Movies>iMovie

It's just where they are kept.

Open your User folder, inside which is your Movie folder, inside which is your iMovie folder that stores the projects.

Sorry but I don't know how to reconnect media in iMovie, which seems to be what you need.

The "Americans" should be coming online soon, so no doubt some more knowledgeable user will be able to help.

When you are finished editing your movie, click SHARE/to iTunes or SHARE/to Media Browser (or several other choices.) This will render the movie in a playable form.

Once you have shared the movie, you no longer have to keep the EVENT files, unless you foresee a need to do more editing, or unless you may use these clips in a different movie at a future date.

I do keep the EVENT files for the above reasons.

It is also possible to move the EVENT files to an external drive. You can either do this when originally importing the clips from the camera, or you can do it later.

To move an EVENT to an external drive, it must be done from within iMovie. Click VIEW/EVENTS BY VOLUME. Now you can drag and drop an EVENT from the Events Source List to any available drive, while maintaing links to the project file.

Thanks AppleMan1958 that plugs a gap in my knowledge and I should imagine answers the OP's question.

2. The first thing to try is to move the Events back to your internal drive. They must be in the exact same place as before, and with the same name as before. Once you have everything back as it was, the yellow triangles should go away. At this point, you can move it back to the external drive using iMovie.

If you are short on space, you may want to do this one event at a time.

3. The Yellow icon is for Projects. The Purple Star is for Events. The Blue Calendar is a virtual folder which holds all events which were shot in a calendar month together.
The Blue folder is available in the Project Source List, and enables you to group projects together, (and this time, it does not have to be related to the month of shooting.)

These icons are mainly useful for drag and drop operations. For example, moving a Project into a file folder. Or dragging an Event to another hard drive.


Also, you may want to look at the Video Tutorials here:
http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie

Message was edited by: AppleMan1958

Interesting thread and vmt to all for the advice so far.

I have discovered that....
A. do not rename any of the folders that you move your projects to. An obvious one I know, but I have not found anyway of relinking other than reverting to the orginal folder name.
I then discovered that....
B. You can't move projects from folder to folder on NAS drives (not sure about just external ones) To keep the project-event link you have to move the project back to the MacHD and then back again to the external drive. I now check the project by 'revealing in finder' to make sure imovie knwos where the files have gone.

Is there anyway of relinking projects back to events? I.e. getting rid of the yellow triangles of death. I have also had a problem with moving iphoto libraries and relinking or even accessing albums (and after following the advice posted!). I have read the help on this and have yet to work through some of the solutions.

I seems quite obvious that as your hard drive fills up you will need to move data to external drives. iLife seems a bit lacking in this respect. Anyone know of any tutorials that explain what exactly is going on as I'm getting really nervous about losing a lot of work.

Just to make it clear.
B. Moving events folder to folder on my NAS was done within imovie. It just copied them and did not move the project - event link

Transfering projects is not easy. The only solution I have found is explained here

http://karsten.schluter.googlepages.com/im08tricks

and involves symbolic links.

Most advice just says to leave the projects as they are only small sizes. But I want to finish the project and archive it cleaning my macbook up yet knowing I can go back to the project in the future if I need to.

I don't think this function is unreasonable and iMovie does not allow this.

Note also that in iMovie it seems impossible to relink footage if the link has been broken and you can't seem to find out where iMovie thinks the footage should be if the link has already been broken. Therefore unless you can remember what you might have done to break the link then you are screwed. This has often cost me much work although time machine has helped out a few times.

Mark