moving ALL imovie to an external HDD

Question

moving ALL imovie to an external HDD

So much of Apple software just WORKS. From a guy who has spent a lot of time on s/w dev, kudos to the team.

However, I should have read the manual on this one before I started farting around, because it ain't simple.

All I want is to move all my imovie files (all clips, all events, all projects - everything) to an external HDD. FEATURE REQUEST: can we not have a single button that says "move all imovie files over to external HDD"?

Alas, I started doing this by selecting and then dragging all the events to my attached HDD, before coming in here and reading that iMovie treats everything as Projects.

I have several concerns/questions

now that I have moved a bunch of stuff already - it appears that moving each project will create duplicate events and i'll have to go through by hand and delete the dupes, correct?
what happens to clips/events that are not indexed by a project? i suppose i have to move them by hand?

thanks in advance for your help

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), ilife 11, ms office 11

Posted on Jul 6, 2011 7:42 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

AppleMan1958

Level 7

27,492 points

Jul 6, 2011 7:57 AM in response to mike_sdfasdfa

If you can move everything that you moved using the Finder back where it was.

Then you can use iMovie to move it.

First, you need an external drive that is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). FAT32 drives need to be reformatted before they will work.

In iMovie, Click VIEW/EVENTS BY DISK. You should see you disk drives in the Event Library and the Project Library.

To copy a project, just drag the small icon for the project to the small icon for the external drive in the Project Library List. If you want to Move, not Copy, hold down the Command Key as you drag.

To copy an Event, drag the small icon for the Event in the Event Library List to the Icon for the external drive in the Event Library List. To Move an Event, hold down the Command Key as you drag.

An easy was to move a project and all associated events and media to an external drive is first to command-drag the project as mentioned above. Then select the project so that it is highlighted in the Project Library. Click FILE/CONSOLIDATE MEDIA... and it will move or copy all the media to the same hard drive as the project.

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Answer 2

Jul 6, 2011 8:12 AM in response to AppleMan1958

thanks

i think it'll be easier to delete the duplicate events than try and find the correct files in finder and ensure they go back to the original hdd. But i might end up deleting the even that the project is referencing, right? Is there any way to know which is which?

what a mess.

now when i click on an event on the external hdd it says "no vid", but i assume that's because my Time Capsule is currently accessing the drive trying to back it up

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Answer 3

Jul 6, 2011 8:22 AM in response to mike_sdfasdfa

Take a look at Ken Stone's Tutorial. He explains it better than I did.

See especially the sections called Project and Events, Project Library, and Event Library.

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Answer 4

Jul 6, 2011 8:26 AM in response to AppleMan1958

excellent thanks!

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Answer 5

Jul 6, 2011 10:40 AM in response to AppleMan1958

From what I can see, Ken's Tutorial doesn't cover the basic problem of locating Events and Projects in iMovie. For example, I have a new iMac with both SSD and internal hard disk drive. The SSD does not have sufficient space to hold iMovie's Events and Projects which must be stored on the larger hard disk drive.

iMovie '11 can't find those Events and Projects (which were moved to the new Mac from an older Mac).

How do we get iMovie to find and use the Events and Projects when they're located on a different disk drive?

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Answer 6

Jul 6, 2011 10:48 AM in response to Ron McElfresh

For the Boot Drive, Events must be in USER/Movies/iMovie Events. Projects must be in USER/Movies/iMovie Projects.

For any other drive, Events must be in the iMovie Events folder at the top level of the drive. Projects must be in the iMovie Projects folder at the top level of the drive. If the are anywhere else, iMovie will not see them.

If you move stuff within iMovie, it will put them there automatically.

If your projects and events were previously on the boot drive of an earlier Mac your Projects are probably still pointing there. My best advice would be to move your Projects (and related events) to the SSD one at a time, and use iMovie to move them to a different drive.

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Answer 7

Jul 6, 2011 6:57 PM in response to AppleMan1958

i have read through Ken Stone's stuff, and understand it all much better now, but still having trouble.

As I said above, I went and copied a bunch of events down onto the external HDD before I found out that I had to use Command+drag to move the Projects (because i wanted to ensure that I got ALL the projects, not just the ones referenced by the project files. I suppose, in hindsight, that if I had done the Projects first, what was left would have been those events not referenced, correct? all the more reason we need a "move all" function).

So now I've moved all the Projects onto the external HDD and I've got a bunch of duplicates (e.g. "event" and "event 1"). Does anyone know how to tell which is the one referenced by the Project, and which I can delete?

thanks

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Answer 8

riesaau

Level 1

4 points

Apr 15, 2014 5:06 AM in response to mike_sdfasdfa

Mike, I'm in the same position as you but I haven't put anythng back on my SSD which is much smaller than the internal HD of my previous computer.

Any luck yet, and some instructions for a dummy like me?

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Answer 9

Apr 16, 2014 9:36 AM in response to riesaau

sorry riesaau! I bought a new iMac and moved everything back over. I believe I will have trouble with the new iMovie and referenced files, but haven't played with all of this in a while... sorry i can't be much help

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