How to merge iMovie Projects and iMovie Events from three drives onto one drive

Rich,

Thank you. I have copied your points and inserted my answers below each point.

1. Whether iMovie 8 is installed or not is not relevant to your issue.

Thanks. That is good to know and I was pretty sure that I would not need it.

2. If you already have an iMovie Events folder at the root level of the destination drive then move it into a folder or rename it.

Thanks. Yes I realized that I might have to do that but I wanted to avoid it if possible.

Is this iMovie Events folder identical to the one you are copying in?

No. The two iMovie Events folders contain totally different events and clips (although the subject matter is very similar) and they have no files or clips in common. The destination iMovie Events folder is about 1.3 TB and contains roughly 190 event subfolders, each one of which contains anything from 5 to 75 individual clips.

The source iMovie Events folder is about 290 GB in size.

Where is the iMovie Projects folder that is associated with it?

The iMovie Projects folder that is associated with the iMovie Events folder is with it on the source drive.

The Events folder contains only media, and you would not be able to open any projects with it, even if you still had the iMovie 8 app, without the associated iMovie Projects folder.

Yes. I realized that the Project data tha is essential for opening up a project is in the Projects folder. I have the iMovie Events folder and the iMovie Projects folder that goes with it. Both are on the source drive whose name is Golf. (My wife's drives have been given names so that they are easier to identify.)

Unless you have an important reason for moving these folders between drives I would just leave them where they are.

Yes. I do have an important reason for moving these folder to another drive. I would like to avoid doing this painful process, but having the folders on different drives is causing even greater problems in trying to find which drive important media is on when it is needed. Another problem caused by having a Projects folder and its corresponding Events folder on three different drive is that I have to back up three drives instead of just one when I do a backup.

And in fact the true situation is even worse. There are sets of Events/Projects folders on seven different drives, consisting of the internal HDDs of two different Macbook Pro laptops plus 5 external USB drives. I'm just trying to bring some order to the chaos. Trying to do backups with Time Machine, or any other backup software is a major headache.

Since you have iMovie 10 on your Mac, open it and do a File/Update Projects and Events. That will update the iMovie 8 projects into the iMovie 10 library where they can be played and edited.

Thanks. That was going to be my next step after consolidating my wife's media into one central place that can be managed snd backed up securely.

Thanks for your helpful suggestions. I had called the Help desk of Apple's Creative Media dept earlier today but two techs who I spoke with weren't able to answer these questions that I had. They said they were not trained in how iMovie worked at a folder/file level. But when drives fail we need to work at a file/folder level to get things running again.

• Mike

So, as I understand your last post, the 1.3TB iMovie Events folder on the destination drive does have an iMovie Projects folder associated with it.

That is correct.

I'm not clear on which drive the iMovie Projects folder for the 1.3TB iMovie Events folder is located.

The iMovie Projects folder associated with the 1.3TB iMovie Events folder is located on the same drive as the 1.3TB iMovie Events folder. They are both together and I aim to keep them together.

With the information that you now have you should be able to get the Projects and Events folders all on one drive. I am wondering whether, if you mix them all up on one drive, iMovie 10 may have trouble sorting out what folders to update.

Yes. I was wondering about that too, which is why I posted my question here hoping that somebody would be able to give me a definitive answer before I start the process of blending them both together.

So, I am thinking that it might be best to do your updating of projects and event in iMovie 10, while the folders are on separate drives.

That sounds like a good plan. Another advantage to that plan is that it will enable me to see if iMovie 10 can update the Events / Projects on the source drives correctly, bearing in mind that the Projects / Events on the source drives were files that I recovered from three HDDs that were failing (bad heads, bad sectors and bad USB interface).

I have already encountered a couple of hundred files that were unreadable but considering the total number of files is up around 90,000 and most of the unreadable files were in the Projects folder, the loss is relatively minor.

Or copy them over to the new drive one at a time and update them after each import.

"One at a time"? Do you mean copy one project and its associated Events one at a time?

If so that would be tricky because:

i) I don't know which Events are associated with which Projects and I can't find out without opening them with iMovie 10, and if I do that iMovie 10 will automatically update them without giving me the chance to just find out what Events go with each Project.

And,

ii) In a few cases some Event clips are used in a few different projects so there is no simple one-to-one, or one-to-many relationship. And again the MacOS file structure makes it nearly impossible to work out what the relationships are.

1.3 TB of media is a lot to have tied up in an events folder of a discontinued app. If you have the space, you might want to copy, not move, the media to a newly created Finder folder.

Yes 1.3 TB is a lot for a discontinued app. It is very hard to deal with and I'm working on helping my wife make the transition to iMovie 10 from iMovie '09 (ver 8.xx.yy). That is one of the reasons that I am doing this project of consolidating her media.

And thanks for the suggestion that I do a copy (not a move) of the media to another drive. I also realized the value of that and I did it a little over a year ago.

Thanks

Rich. Thanks for the suggestion but two problems with your suggestion.

1) iMovie '09 (Version 8.0.6 ( 8.2.1 )) is not still installed. We now only have iMovie 10.1.6 installed which is the highest that will run on her mid-2009 Macbook Pro which runs MacOS 10.11.6 El Capitan.

And.

2) You recommend "Do an Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste, of the folders that contain the subfolders, from one drive to the root level of the other. "

Now, I want to copy the events and projects from one drive ( called "Golf") to the other drive (called "3TB-Main-Drive").

However, the folder (on Golf) that contains the subfolders is called "iMovie Events" and it is in the root level of Golf. I want to copy these subfolders to "3TB-Main-Drive" but "3TB-Main-Drive" already contains an folder in its root called "iMovie Events". To follow your suggestion of "copying the folder that contains the subfolders" which is "iMovie Events" would put two folders called "iMovie Events" in the root level of "3TB-Main-Drive" which, as you know, is illegal because a root (or any folder for that matter) cannot contain two subfolders with the same name.

Is that what you really meant? Or am I misunderstanding your instructions?

Thanks

Mike