Why don't my imported movie files show in iMovie?

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Why don't my imported movie files show in iMovie?

I have a frustrating problem, and I don't know what to do. Sometimes when I import a movie file (usually a dv file) into iMovie, it doesn't show up. If I go to my finder, however, and look in the coresponding event folder, it's there. I can even open it in Quicktime and watch it no problem. It just doesn't show in iMovie when I have iMovie open, therefore I have no way of editing it. Sometimes if I try and import it again, it'll work fine, and sometimes it will only show a portion of the video in my iMovie, while the entire video is seemingly intact in the finder. I have plenty of room on my hard drive for the video. It does this with mov files too sometimes. Is there just a roblem with my iMovie?

iMovie '09-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Feb 5, 2012 11:10 PM

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Answer 1

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anyhowe

Level 1

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Mar 17, 2012 8:38 PM in response to alternate1

I had the exact same problem. Imovie does not behave well when memory/storage is challenged. Each 3 gig of video takes up more than 20 gig of room when imported. In my case the total of the clips I imported bumped up against my total storage available. They never showed up in Imovie, but i lost 90 gig on my HD. Took me a while to discover (via Finder) they were in Imovie but would not show up. Likely what you imported exceeded your memory and or storage. Delete the files from imovie using Finder then load them in smaller increments.

I movie takes a lot of memory and hd space to do much of its work, including deleting portions of your clips. Bumping up against the memory will cause all sorts of unwanted problems. GL

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Answer 2

alternate1 Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 19, 2012 4:44 PM in response to anyhowe

I actually figured it out. I thought it was the memory thing, but it turns out that iMovie was automatically marking the movies I was importing as "rejected" for some reason. They weren't showing up in the iMovie window (but werein the finder) because I didn't have "show all clips" marked at the bottom of the iMovie window. So, it was marking them as "rejected" and only showing movies that weren't marked as "rejected". Once I clicked to show all, they all appeared. Then, I simply unmarked them as rejected since there was nothing wrong with them in the first place. Hopefully this helps anyone else with the problem. I would have posted sooner, but totally forgot I posted this question. Sorry!

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Answer 3

Mar 20, 2012 8:21 PM in response to alternate1

Make sure your movie is perfectly compatible with imovie, if not, get a imovie video converter from mac-videoconverter.com site and directly convert your video to iMovie supported video formats.

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Answer 4

Jul 2, 2012 11:34 PM in response to hobbystars

This has been driving me barmy as well. I am on early 2011 MacBook Pro unibody, Lion OSX10.7.4. Clicking 'import' and navigating to the movie file just would not work. Why oh why? Your answers about showing 'all clips' in the event window or iMovie marking them as rejected were not relevant. Also these are movie clips I have put on my hard disk from my phone, they have not come through iPhoto.

Despair. No forums hold the answer. Until I remembered a Microsoft glitch in Lion that I just found out yesterday. (Does anybody else think that Lion is actually all downsides from 10.6.8? I haven't yet found a single thing that makes it better, and loads of things that make it worse. And I waited a year to 'upgrade'). Exel files with a '/' in the filename give you this infuriating message saying they are in use by another user. Er... doh, no other users are connected, no one else even knows these files exist, never mind uses them at the same time. Magic: Delete the '/' from the filename, and hey presto all is fine.

EXACT SAME THiNG with iMovie files. I took the '/' out of the filename and import now works fine. There you are. Yet another bit of Lion poop.

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