iMovie '11 missing events and projects

Glad others have had succes with this fix, but it has eluded me. I was fine with my new imac which came with Lion and I was using imovie 11 for a while now with no missing files. I have 5 projects in the project window and was worling on one of them which was only two minutes long. Went to open it up a few hours later and the built project is gone. Nothing there.

The other projects are there and all the thumbnails for the mising project are in the event libray and I can hopefully rebuild it, but why is this one project not showing up? I'm afraid it will disappear again if I do rebuild.

Went through the throwing out the com.apple.imovieapp.plist and that didn't change anything. There is no "com.apple.iApps.plist" in the library as mentioned above. There is a "com.apple.iApp.plst.locked" file but nobody said to take that one out.

Also, I don't get the Mac OS X Menu and the Mac OS X utilities window when I reboot with the Command R held down. I just get a window asking what language I want to run the computer in. What am I doing wrong? Help!

Thanks.

OK, figured out how to run the disk utility and did fix permissions but it did not fix the iMovie missing projects issue. Still can't find any file by the name "com.apple.iApps.plis"- only can find "com.apple.iApps.plis.locked"

I've just updated our iMac to Snow Leopard. We also appear to be having this issue.

I would appreciate your help with the following questions.

1. In my computer I found the following file, but not the one you listed. Is this the same thing?

com.apple.iMovie8.plist

2. When you said to Move it out of the Prefs Folder, where did you move it to?

Thanks!

I ended up buying the extended warrnaty with phone help from Apple. I called and they were totally and completely UNhelpful. They had no clue as to the problem or how to fix it. Told me to upgrade to the latest version of Lion and all other upgrades, like my printer driver, ect., and then they would send me an e-mail with instructions about doing something with preferances. I did the updates, which did NOT fix iMovie 11. Then I read the instructions that they sent and it was for an OLDER version of Lion and had nothing to do with fixing any issues with iMovie.

A complete waste of time and incorrect information. Can't believe this is their idea of service. Actually, it was late and they were closing and the guy just wanted to get off the phone and go home. Cared not one bit about my issues, in my opinion.

I'm going to continue to bug the heck out of them until they help me fix this. Can't belive I spent over $2.500 for a computer and then had to spend another $150 for the right to call them and still can't get the product to work. Products way over priced and often don't work well, and so far, lousy service. But I keep buying these things.

KROlsen wrote:

I'm going to continue to bug the heck out of them until they help me fix this.

Any news on this?

I am a very new Mac user and already bumped on this problem 😟 so my hard work has gone.

I did delete com.apple.iMovieApp.plist but still no joy.

I also have a com.apple.iMovieApp.plist.locked file in that library folder.

After 25 years of Windows problems, Mac world beat me that hard in a couple of weeks.

I am so disappointed 😟

Yes, I did get this mostly fixed. First I had to buy the phone support and the two year extended warranty, which I recommend. Yea, I know, why pay for help on a computer that cost 3 times the price of other brands and then have to pay for somebody to work through the bad bugs in their own software?

A crime to me, but.....

One guy was completely clueless and gave me the wrong infromation and did nothing to help. I had to call back and then got sent to a Tier Two Specialist who was pretty darn good. He was stumped on one thing, but he got me going and so far it has been OK.

Basically, he had me do what has been mentioned here, but had me trash all the imovie things in libray folder.

The other thing for me was, that I was keeping iMovie HD movies on the same hard drive on my iMac.

This should be fine, and the apple guy confirmed that this was OK, but for some reason iMovie 11 kept finding those iMovie HD movies and put them in my iMovie 11 movie folder. Then iMovie 11 would hide an iMovie 11 project in a iMovie HD folder, but only half of the project would still be existing. I could drag it out and put it into the imovie 11 project timeline but it wasn't all there.

They had no answer for that one. So I took off from my iMac hard drive all the older iMovei HD movies and put them on an external drive and keep it turned off and so far, I have had no more problems.

Where excly do I look for User blah blah blah? Sorry I ask such a stupid question I'm new in this Mac World

My problem is a little bit similar but the procedure recommended did not work. I was working on a project that was duplicated from an old one. I was almost finishing it and copied a text box from a frame to another. Then I closed the project and when tried to open it back it had simply vanished from the project library, however the file is still inside iMovies projects folder. All other projects there are seen and open perfectly. Only this one is still there showing an amount of 100 MB of information but it seems that iMovie no longer recognizes it as a project. What to do in this case?

How do i find

Go to Users > [your account] > Library > Preferences

Sorry, new to mac!!

Working on a project for work and it just lost the event!!!

Adam

Whenever I delete this file: com.apple.iMovieApp.plist and open iMovie again, it appers again and no matter how many ways I tried to remove it and relunch iMovies, it reappers again!

iMovie rebuilds the preference file when next opened after deleting the old file. The new preference file will have the default settings. If you wish to change these to your own settings, in iMovie's menu select iMovie > Preferences then make any changes in each of the tabs.

The preference file can become corrupted in some circumstances, causing problems with iMovie. Deleting (trashing) the file, thus forcing iMovie to rebuild it, will often fix problems. None of the iLife apps will work without a preference file (.plist file). Most other apps also use preference files, whether from Apple or 3rd parties.

John

Message was edited by: John Cogdell

Well, thanx.
But the project is still missing and the prefrence trashing thingy isn't working.
Thanx anywas.

I remember before I bought my iMac being told that "it just works" by a few people but I am always having niggly problems with it. Now we have the disappearing Projects in iMovie too. Basically they were there...now they are much reduced in number. Some my daughter has spent hours editing together. Tried the deletion of the library file mentioned but hasnt cured anything. Are they individually recoverable from a Time Machine back up (and if not whats the point of Time Machine) ? Any thoughts appreciated - glad I kept a Windows PC.

It sounds like there are a lot of unhappy iMovie users.

My problem is that I'm simply trying to save Events and Projects onto an external hard drive.

I was able to drag the Events over no problem but I can't drag the Projects to the external hard drive because the external hard drive icon doesn't appear at the same time as the projects.

I'm either looking at the Project Library that has '13 projects' written at the bottom and 'Macintosh HD' highlighted in blue at the top, or.. after clicking on the blue highlight I still see that plus two external hard drive icons - but no projects, and therefore nothing to drag and '0 projects' written at the bottom.

If there's still anyone lurking on this thread that hasn't blown their brains out yet, hats off for holding on in there and if you have any pointers as to how to cure my problem it would be much appreciated.

Thanks! A

I just opened iMovie to find the same problem. No projects, no events. iMovie 11 (v 9.0.9), OS X 10.8.4.

Trashed both com.apple.iApps.plist and com.apple.iMovieApp.plist, repaired Disk Permissions, and rebooted. No luck.

Does anyone else have other ideas? All my Events and Projects are on the same HD as the startup volume (no externals).

Thanks!

-Eric