Very old iMovie (version 2) project

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Very old iMovie (version 2) project

Hello. I have a few iMovie 2 and 3 projects with family video that I am trying to revive. I spent a while with some very helpful Apple folks on the phone but no luck finding a way to bring them to iMovie 10. I am not very concerned about the projects themselves, and would be thrilled to just bring in each Clip independently. My next move (if someone doesn't have an answer here) is to find an old Mac and somehow get some old OS disks and early versions of iLife and export them to progressively newer versions of iMovie until I get to one that I can read in my M1 MBP. I've looked in the community forum but I haven't found anything that could help me.

Does anyone know of any program/utility that could read the DV files from early iMovie?

Thank you in advance!

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Dec 21, 2020 7:44 AM

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Answer 1

Rich839

Level 8

47,268 points

Dec 21, 2020 8:52 AM in response to Legacy_iMovie

Hi,

iMovie 2 and 3 were pretty seminal versions. I'm not familiar with their architecture. The earliest version that I have on my Mac is iMovie 6. However, on the outside chance that the architecture is similar to iMovie 6, you can try the below procedure and see if it works for you.

Do a Control-click on the project's icon, and then click on Show Package Contents in the drop down menu that appears. See if there is a Media folder for the project. Assuming that any files were displayed, you can copy-drag (drag while pressing the Opion key) the media to your desktop. It should play there, at least with QuickTimePlayer 7.

If they don't play, you can convert the clips to Mp4 with the free download, Handbrake. You can get Handbrake here:

https://handbrake.fr/

A simple way to do it is to open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source. Navigate to your video and choose it as the source from the resulting screen. Then do File/Start Encoding. Wait a couple of minutes for the conversion to complete. Then save the converted clip.

-- Rich

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