imovie - hard drive shows up as a camera and not an external hard drive

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imovie - hard drive shows up as a camera and not an external hard drive

I have an external hard drive I am trying to work out of for movie editing using iMovie. When I try to import media from the hard drive, in the import window, the hard drive shows up as a Camera device instead of as a hard drive under the device options.

When I click on the external hard drive that shows up as a camera, only a few videos show up when I have over 1tb of videos on the drive.

I tried plugging in my 5tb hard drive to see if it would have the same issue and the 5tb hard drive shows up under the device section in the import options just like its supposed to.

Any idea on why this is happening with my first hard drive and how to fix it?

Posted on May 3, 2020 12:40 PM

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Answer 1

Joseph_S.

Community Specialist

May 4, 2020 9:39 AM in response to hyun18

Hey there hyun18,

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. I understand you’re having some issues with the way your external drive is being seen in iMovie for Mac. I’ll be happy to help.

To verify, does this hard drive appear as expected in Finder? If so, you may want to check if macOS and iMovie are up to date:

If everything is up to date, disconnect your drive and other accessories, then reset the SMC and NVRAM on your Mac:

If you still have issues, get following steps may help:

Create another user account on your Mac, then test iMovie with the new user account
Reset iMovie to default settings Libraries won't be affected when you do this.
Delete iMovie, then redownload and reinstall it. Libraries won't be affected.

You can read more about this here:

If iMovie isn't working on your Mac

Regards.

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imovie - hard drive shows up as a camera and not an external hard drive

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