iMovie unable to import to network home users - alternative solution sought

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Level 1

5 points

iMovie unable to import to network home users - alternative solution sought

We have a small educational network of just over 40 macs (20 of which are MacBooks, 20 iMacs) and 1 Xserve. Since the update to iMovie '09 no network users are able to make use of iMovie due to the "Can't Create Event" error (no permissions to write to /iMovie Events.localized) which is well documented.

The one solution I can find is well documented and quite easy to accomplish with ARD, but it involves creating a local folder on the root of each machine's hard drive to store iMovie events! This is unfortunately completely useless to us. The entire point of having network home folders in the first place is so that any student or staff member can work on any system. Our network is perfectly capable of support the amount of data storage and throughput this required (and this worked properly prior to iMovie '09).

Does anyone happen to have a solution which works properly in this situation?

Thanks!

Many Macs, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Jan 11, 2011 11:18 AM

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Answer 1

Xenolith

Level 1

25 points

Jan 20, 2011 8:57 AM in response to WaldenGreen

Check out the following link

http://carryflag.blogspot.com/2010/06/imovie-event-library-on-network-drive.html ?showComment=1295542318125#c1534567214781547602

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Answer 2

Apr 15, 2011 2:09 AM in response to WaldenGreen

Import the Movie into iPhoto,
then in iMovie import to iMove from iPhoto.

I would like a better solution…..

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APPLE THIS IS A KEY EDUCATIONAL ISSUE, PLEASE FIX !!!

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Anyone else have a better "Fix" ? I would really like to nail this one….

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Answer 3

Sep 28, 2011 2:23 AM in response to WaldenGreen

We're running 10.6 with iMovie 11 and had similar problems. The fix was as follows and the reason I did it this way was because of permissions (enabled root account but still couldnt locally delete iMovie Events.localized) anyway...

This deletes the iMovie local directory and creates a link to the Movies folder in the users area,

meaning kids can logon to any machine and there iMovie project is there and working.

Start one of the macs in target disk mode and plug into another mac with a firewire cable then open terminal.

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD\ 1

rmdir /iMovie\ Events.localized

ln -s /$HOME/Movies iMovie\ Events.localized

Reboot the machine, log in as a user and try and import into iMovie and it should now work.
You can also look in there home directory in finder and in the movies folder should be the test video you imported.

Repeat on all computers.

Hope this helps, I've been bashing my head against the wall for weeks trying "fixes" I found on the net

that all resulted in a "free for all" Events directory which also meant a malicious kid could delete another

pupils work.

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Answer 4

Sep 28, 2011 4:24 AM in response to Xenolith

Xenolith wrote:

Check out the following link

http://carryflag.blogspot.com/2010/06/imovie-event-library-on-network-drive.html ?showComment=1295542318125#c1534567214781547602

The tip form the above article is to do the following in Terminal

defaults write -app iMovie allowNV -bool true

I am not sure if the other responders have tried it yet. I do have my own tip. The problem is similar to other programs I have come across not working properly with network home directories, e.g. Adobe Acrobat Pro. I discovered that several of these badly written programs will work with network home directories with no complicated adjustments if you share the network home directories via NFS instead of AFP.

To do this you will need to edit the share properties, and then reselect the home directory location for each user account in Workgroup Manager. The old afp home directory path would look something like

afp://server.example.com/Volumes/Users

the new NFS path would look something like

nfs://server.example.com/Volumes/Users

Workgroup Manager will continue to list the old AFP style path until you have changed all the users to the new path.

Might be worth trying with a test user account.

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