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Source clip missing

I have been working on an iMovie project over the past week. Everything was going well, when suddenly I could no longer play the clips. The Events Library in the left panel has an exclamation mark inside a yellow triangle; every clip in the project window has the same; and when I attempt the play the project, there is a message, "Source clip is missing" below a rectangle containing a white star.

I have not moved the source clips, and they are still playable in Quicktime.

I can't find anything in the Help file, or in these discussion forums about Source Clips.

Has anyone had a similar situation, or know how to get iMovie 09 to link to the source files? I thought about trashing the preference file for iMovie, but didn't want to do that unless I can't find an answer.

Another thought: Is there a limit on the length of a movie in iMovie? the movie I am working on is just over 2 hours long.

Intel iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Feb 16, 2009 7:49 AM

Reply
98 replies

Aug 8, 2010 3:50 PM in response to Bob McAdams

I encountered this problem when I moved files around on my external drive to "better" organize them.

I've found that the easiest way to determine where iMovie thinks the source clip is, is to:

- Select the project from the Project Library
- Click on Edit Project
- Control click the project clip
- Select "Reveal in Finder"

Finder then pops up with the location of the source clip highlighted.

Hopefully Apple can find an easier way. I have experienced similar problems sometimes in Adobe Lightroom 3. However, Adobe anticipated the problem and lets you click on the folder in the library and easily re-establish the path to the source photos.

Nov 18, 2010 3:10 AM in response to tanialepe

I tried the above but didn't work for me
But this did:

Hover your cursor over yellow triangle (bottom left in clip) and take a careful note of the path it is searching for. Check in Finder that you haven't renamed/moved anything and change back name and/or bring back clips so they match exactly the path shown when you hover over triangle.

In my case iMovie was looking for 'New Event' within the path but I'd changed this to the title of the movie. I changed this back to 'New Event' in Finder, quit iMovie, opened iMovie and all the clips were back

Feb 26, 2011 9:47 AM in response to ckibsen

ckibsen - great tip on the whole alias thing! I had never considered that for some reason, but it works like a charm. The bonus is that my projects are still there when my external drive is disconnected, even though they won't find the clips. When the drive is reconnected, everything works fine.

This is important when your event library is over 400GB and your MacBook Air has a measly 120GB SSD drive!

Feb 26, 2011 2:34 PM in response to Bob McAdams

You may have sorted this by now but just to say that although iMovie 09 doesn't give you the option to reconnect there's a way to do it yourself.

If you hover your cursor over the yellow triangle (don't click) a box will appear giving you the path containing the location and name of the file iMovie is looking for. Make a note of this and if necessary move back the file and/or change back the name.

Had to use iMovie recently but very glad to get out of there and back to Final Cut!

Apr 10, 2011 7:43 PM in response to dixonge

I have a variation of ckibsen's "alias solution" in case you have a lot of clips in your iphoto library.

These "iPhoto" videos seem to reside in the iPhoto library and NOT "iMovie events" folder. For me, all of the recommended "consolidation and moving" methods failed when it came to clips that resided in iPhoto. No matter what I did (even the alias method) ended with "missing clips" until I tried "symbolic link" see link below:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/symboliclinker.html

I basically copied my iPhoto library to the new external drive. Made a symbolic link by control clicking the "newly copied" iPhoto library file. Then moved this link back to the "Pictures" folder on my internal drive. Like the "alias method you need to rename the symbolic link "iphoto library" in this case. It seems to replicate the same file tree and solve the "missing clips" issue I was having with videos that came from iPhoto. The files are on the external drive but iMovie is tricked into thinking they are on the internal drive.

Problem solved-- as far as I can tell : ).

May 23, 2011 10:19 PM in response to Bob McAdams

There is actually a way to fix these problems without losing any editing. It does involve some Terminal work, though, so if you get freaked out by anything command-line-y, just use the rename or symbolic link solutions. Personally, I like everything clean (i.e., named the way I want it (i.e., not something like “Screen Recording.mov” ) and with no symbolic links or anything) , so this works perfectly for me:



(Warning: I tried this with iMovie '09. Using this with another version of iMovie may corrupt your project, so back it up or copy it and do this with the copy.)

(Note: There are two project files. One is the iMovie project file (with the .rcproject extension) that contains the other file (named “Project” with no extension) . Throughout this walkthrough, the former file is referred to as the “project package” and the latter is referred to as the “Project file” .)



0. Make sure that you have a working backup of everything related (not totally required, but I like to be on the safe side) .

1. Hover over the warning sign (yellow triangle with a black exclamation point) in the lower left corner of the moved|renamed|whatever clip. This will give you a path to where the clip file is expected. Note this path. Repeat this step for all missing clips in the same project.

2. Locate the clip in the Finder and note its path. Do this for all missing clips you did step 1 for.

3. Quit iMovie.

4. Locate the project with references to the missing clip in the Finder. Right-click it and choose “Show Package Contents” .

5. In the project package, there should be a binary file (Quick Look says it's a “Document” ) called “Project” . Copy this file to a workspace (the Desktop is fine) .

6. Launch Terminal, type ‘cd ’ (that trailing space is important!) and drag the folder you copied the file from step 4 to into the Terminal window. It should automatically copy the working folder's path onto the line, so if you used the Desktop, you should have ‘cd /Users/username/Desktop’ . Hit the return key.

7. You should get another prompt, but this time instead of ‘computername:~ username$’ it should be ‘computername:workingfolder username$’ .

8. Type ‘plutil -convert xml1 Project && open -a TextEdit Project’ and hit return. This tells Terminal to use plutil to convert the Project file to the xml1 format (which is human-readable) and if that succeeds, open the file with TextEdit.

9. The Project file should now be open in TextEdit. Find the path where the clip is expected, and change it to the path where the clip is now. If you have multiple missing clips, repeat this step for each expected path | actual path pair.

10. Save and close the Project file. If you have closed the Terminal window you worked in in steps 6-8, redo step 6, then continue with step 11.

11. In Terminal, type ‘plutil -convert binary1 Project’ and hit return. This tells Terminal to use plutil to convert the Project file to the binary1 format (which is what iMovie recognizes) .

12. Move the Project file from your working folder back to the project package. The Finder will ask you if you want to replace the file. Choose “Replace” .

13. Close the Terminal window, and any Finder windows opened.

14. Launch iMovie and check the project.

Jul 30, 2011 8:40 PM in response to Bob McAdams

I just encountered this problem as well and after reading TC's comments I was able to reconnect all of my media. It turned out that I only needed to change the Volume name for the paths in the project files. And there was actually a simpler and faster way to do it rather than using Terminal. Here's what I did:


1. Download TextWrangler from App Store (it's currently free).

2. Find the complete path for where the original video file recides and make a note of it if needed.

3. Right click on you iMovie Project file and "Show Package Contents".

4. Open the file named "Project" with TextWrangler.

5. Use the Find & Replace function to quickly fix your links. (i.e. I only needed to change /Volume/Storage/ to /Volume/Mac Storage/).

6. Save and close.

Repeat steps 3 to 6 for the rest of your files and you should back on track!


Thanks goes to TC for getting me on the right track!


I must say, it sure is strange that Apple didn't implement a "reconnect"-feature for videos since iMovie can do it with sound and music tracks from iTunes in the same project...

Source clip missing

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