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iMovie '11 - yellow exclamation point and "view-->reveal in event browser" DO NOT WORK. how do i find missing source clips?

--instructions in Apple help files for finding missing clips:--



To find the source video for a clip in your project:

In the Project browser, select the video clip whose source you want to locate.



Choose View > “Reveal in Event Browser”; the View menu appears in a light gray bar across the top of your computer screen.



The source video for the selected video clip in your project is outlined in yellow.

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of course, if the source clip is missing, this process only brings up a greyed-out menu bar under View. so you can't figure out WHAT THE @$#*@#*$ imovie is looking for. what is the name of the missing source clip? where does iMovie want you to put it if you can find a copy? and how many times do i have to post this question?


--


elsewhere, people say to hover over the yellow exclamation point to find info about the source file.


hovering over the yellow exclamation point on my iMovie shows a date. that's all. no folder or file names, no paths. this is such @#$:@#.


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and has Apple noticed that thousands and thousands of people on its support site and the rest of the internet are posting the same questions? perhaps this is an indication that 1) iMovie and its interface were not adequately spruced up for a whole new release that some of us wasted our money actually *buying* and/or 2) that Mac support is doing a horrible job of addressing these basic questions and ensuring that people can get at the relevant information.

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iMovie '11, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Mar 27, 2012 11:14 AM

Reply
12 replies

Apr 7, 2012 1:20 PM in response to magdalen23

Just a thing I noticed:

Be sure your iMovie Events folder and iMovie Projects folder are not hidden away in other folders. In other words, your file/folder structure should be


"/User/Movies/iMovie Events + iMovie Projects".


I was going around in circles with this because iMovie didn't "see" my events or projects, which were hidden away in sub-folders of the "Movies" folder. I tried getting rid of the iMovie preferences and restarting and fixing access privileges, etc. to no avail.


All I had to do is move these Events and Projects folders directly under "Movies" and I had everything back!

May 19, 2012 11:17 AM in response to magdalen23

This is driving me absolutely nuts too. I do NOT have the yellow exclamation point and yet even for those projects, the "Reveal in Event Browser" is greyed out, so I can't see which Events are the sources for my Projects. I want to delete a large number of Events that are redundant/duplicates/messed with--but I can't. I'm reluctant to tidy up my iMovie because i'm afraid of deleting a valued Event. 😕


The support in general for imovie and apple products are really bad. Questions in forums rarely get answered, and for some reason when people do answer, they don't address the original questions, or just don't read the original poster's actual scenario properly. Grrrr. 😟

Sep 8, 2012 11:01 AM in response to Astromyx

Yep it's absolutely pathetic isn't it. I was religious about moving events only by dragging in iMovie yet it has still lost the links, so I'm left with a project pointing to the old location. All the events are there, but the people who wrote this rubbish didn't think to give you an option to tell iMovie where the new things are to fix when it screws up.


So now my project is totally wrecked, and as someone else has posted here, Apple's own support tech on how to fix this has clearly never ever been tried AS THE MENU OPTION IS GREYED OUT.


Annoyed? As you can tell, I'm just a bit..... annoyed......

Nov 9, 2012 3:44 PM in response to magdalen23

I had the same issue.


To make things more organized I had moved the files and renamed them and it killed the link to my project.


This pdf helped me (or you can google search "imovie 09" sourceclip is missing")

http://www.wellys.com/movies/iMovie%2009%20Source%20clip%20is%20missing.pdf


It gives great step by step instructions to of relinking the file and I was able to fix it - could have never even come close without it. It gets a bit technical - you have to open the terminal, convert the project file to binary, edit the text, change the pathway, and then convert it back (actually I don't even know what I really did) but the steps were very clear.


*One note - to open terminal go to applications --> utilities folder.


Good luck.

Dec 8, 2012 2:47 PM in response to magdalen23

Okay, so I had the same problem:


All I was trying to do was organize my iMovie files/projects/events, and I somehow rearranged the entire interface. Most of my projects couldn't find the original source files because I had renamed folders and moved files around.


Here's what I did. If you hover over the yellow exclamation point, it will show you where it is TRYING to find your file. For example, mine said: /Users/ash/Movies/iMovie Events/misc/obsessed.mov with "misc" being the name of the original event, and "obsessed.mov" being the name of the original file. But since I had renamed "misc," and moved some of the files out of that folder and into a new one, iMovie had a conniption.


What I did was go back into the "iMovie Events" folder in my Finder, and just created a NEW folder entitled "misc" (even though I had just deleted the original one), and just moved those original source files back into that folder. I fooled the program. And it worked! So now, when iMovie tries to follow that path, it is able to find the "misc" folder with the files it originally had before I ruined everything.


Hope this helps!

Dec 18, 2013 4:39 AM in response to magdalen23

Check if the file extensions were changed. Try changing it back.


I had original files as MP4s and when I imported the files, iMovie asked if I wanted to compress the files. I clicked yes, and didn't know it converted my files to .mov. I changed them back and it re-links the files in my Events back to my project.


1. Hover over the exclamation marks to find the path. Note the path, filename, and the extension.

2. Browse to that directory and ensure path, filename, and extension match exactly.

3. If not, change it.

4. Restart iMovie.


And yes, hover over the exclamation mark for 2-3 seconds shows you where it's looking for the file. That helped!

Jan 2, 2014 12:36 PM in response to therealdee420

This solution worked. I was able to locate the name of the folder it was looking for which I had manually changed in finder. Whoops! Won't be doing that again.


If you want to change the name of the event after it's been imported, you can double-click on the event in iMovie and edit there. If you haven't used it in a project, you can rename in Finder and restart iMovie. It will then see the new name.

iMovie '11 - yellow exclamation point and "view-->reveal in event browser" DO NOT WORK. how do i find missing source clips?

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