iMovie 11 does not see iPhoto videos

Similar to issues with iPhoto and iMovie '09, you may need to instal QuickTime Player 7 (if not already installed). Apparently, some older video file formats need to have QuickTime Player 7 installed in order to play. Possibly, iMovie '11 also needs this. See this Apple article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3355

John

Sorry to hear it didn't work for you Neville. My copy of iLife '11 should be delivered on Monday (it's now Saturday evening here). Once I've got things up and running, I'll be able to see what happens with my iPhoto videos, although I only have a few.

As a quick test, close iMovie, then drag one of your shorter iPhoto videos to the Desktop, then drag it back to iPhoto. Open iMovie - possibly it will now see the freshly imported video in iPhoto. I have a vague recollection that I suggested this to another user in the iMovie '09 forum, and I believe it did the trick. So, here's hoping!

I'll let you know how things go with my iPhoto videos.

John

It seems that iMovie has lost the ability to see videos that are imported into iPhoto with the above checkbox unchecked.

That's interesting - thanks for letting us know Neville. It was good thinking on your part to change that preference. This will help others with similar issues. As I always have my preference set to copy items to the iPhoto Library, hopefully I won't see any problems.

Once I'm running with iLife '11 (hopefully some time on Monday) I will let you know how things go.

John

I upgraded from 9 to 11.

I can see iphoto videos, but everything else is greyed out. Itunes, Photo's, all media on the bar. I literally can only use video in imovie. No photo's. Any suggestions for this?

I did the following, and solved the "MISSING VIDEO CLIPS SCARE" I had on our iMac; we have only a tiny amount of video / photos on our Macbook Pro . . . and the iLife '11 stuff loaded normally for that (knock on wood).

(note: I did notice iMovie '09 still exists in my applications folder in the 'iMovie (previous version)' folder) . . .

1) Couldn't see the "iPhoto Videos" as mentioned above in the "Event Library" (lower left)

2) Needed to re-boot iPhoto --> to import / update thumbnails (or something like that)

(Restarted iMac)

3) Open Applications folder --> Utilities folder --> run "Disk Utility"

4) In Disk Utility --> click "Repair Permissions" (about 8 min / avoided running any other programs)

(Restarted iMac again)

5) Then, iMovie found the "iPhoto Videos" normally (note: iMovie takes 2 or 3 mins to boot up, and load all our clips . . . seems like a bit longer than before . . . so, be patient. From there = works great)

HTH!

I have the same example problem and symptoms as Neville does. Roughly 12,000 photos and 700 iPhoto videos -- none of them are copied into the Library. My old Mac Mini couldn't handle them, so I never generated thumbnails for them. Was looking forward to working with them on my new iMac and iMovie '11.

I tried JBinCalifornia's suggestion of rebooting and fixing permissions -- no help.

Also repeated Neville's experience -- importing with the checkbox selected to copy into iPhoto Library worked -- video showed up in iMovie.

BTW, every time iMovie starts up it scans the iPhoto library looking for clips, but doesn't find the ones that were not copied into the library.

John Cogdell said:
As I always have my preference set to copy items to the iPhoto Library, hopefully I won't see any problems. Once I'm running with iLife '11 (hopefully some time on Monday) I will let you know how things go.

Neville, just to let you know (as promised), everything went very smoothly with my iLife '11 upgrade. All my iPhoto videos showed up in iMovie '11 within the item "iPhoto Videos" in the Events Library. But, as I mentioned earlier, my preferences are set to copy photos to the iPhoto Library.

After installing iLife '11, my first step was to open iPhoto and allow the database to update. Once I was satisfied that iPhoto was running OK, I then opened iMovie and waited for it to do all the upgrading. That went smoothly also, other than a warning about a Centred Title missing from one of my iPhoto Videos and that the video wouldn't play without it. I haven't bothered to track that down yet - the video wasn't identified in the warning message.

I appreciate this doesn't really help you solve your issue, but it does help to confirm that things seem to work OK when the iPhoto preference is set to the option I've selected (copy photos). Note that my iPhoto Library is located on the internal drive. I have a small number of photos that I keep in separate folders outside of the iPhoto Library - mainly stuff I've done for other people that I don't want cluttering up iPhoto (although I realise that these can be hidden in iPhoto).

John

I just upgraded to ilife 11. iMovie imported videos from iphoto (I did have the copy to library option checked in iphoto) but only loaded movie clips from iphoto for 2009 and 2010. I could import manually but had to use the Adjust date and time option so they'd be filed correctly (otherwise the date is the current date and time when you do the import). Also, I inadvertently used the Space Saver option which removed all clips from the event library that were not part of a project. How do I get them back?

Neville -- I'll file a bug on this -- forgive me, but how do I do that? I can't find anywhere to file a bug. 🙂

BTW, on my machine I've found a "workaround"...

If I right click on my hard disk in the Event Library and select Import Movies..., the Finder Sidebar has items under Media called Music, Photos and Movies. If I select Movies, I get a choice of iMovie, Movies, iPhoto and iTunes.

If I select iPhoto, I see thumbnails of all of my iPhoto videos -- even though they were not copied into the iPhoto Library.

You can display them as icons or in a list, and you can do some basic searching by name. For the list view, you can Show Columns: Name, Duration, Dimensions, Size and Kind. Unfortunately Date isn't one of the options.

Within the iPhoto selection, I can select my folders and the list becomes limited to the videos in each folder. Since my folders are all named Year-Month, I can narrow my selection to a particular set from a particular month.

So far, this seems to work fairly well as a way to import my iPhoto videos into iMovie...

My problem is similar, the iPhoto videos show up in iMovie but only the first frame. I have about 3 dozen .1 second videos now. The videos still exist in their entirety in iPhoto. I'm going to hate it if I have to export and import all these videos again.