Can't import archives to iMovie

I was just trying to troubleshoot this problem and restarting iMovie worked for me. You've likely tried this, but I spent an hour searching for answers first. How frustrating.

I had imported directly from my camera first, then tried to import from archive and it failed. Restarting iMovie then going straight to the "Import from Archive" worked for me.

Good luck.

I have exactly the same problem.

I also noticed that iMovie 11

- Has this problem when importing archives that were created by imovie 10.0.4 and are perfectly importable by imove 10.0.4.

- Also iMovie 11 is glitchy and occasionally crashes when previewing clips on a camera using the import panel where iMovie 10.0.4 has no such problem with the same clips.

- Also iMovie 11 fails when creating a camera archive from camera where 10.0.4 does not fail.

Have you been able to resolve?

I have a similar problem using iMovie 11.When I go to File --> Import from Camera Archive, I can select the archive just fine (it's not grayed out), and then I get the import screen where I can select clips to import. Then I check some clips and click import, and the process starts.

But then the clip imports ALWAYS fail with a message "iMovie can't import the selected clip. To make a camera archive. . ."

I made the camera archives using iMovie 11. So I don't get why iMovie 11 wouldn't open an archive that was made by the same version of iMovie.

DragonWoman wrote:

I was just trying to troubleshoot this problem and restarting iMovie worked for me. You've likely tried this, but I spent an hour searching for answers first. How frustrating.

I had imported directly from my camera first, then tried to import from archive and it failed. Restarting iMovie then going straight to the "Import from Archive" worked for me.

Good luck.

I had the same problem. I would create an archive with iMovie '11 and immediately see if I could import it, but it would say that it wasn't a camera archive. I restarted iMovie and that also fixed my problem and it is now able to recognize the camera archive correctly.

Thank you! More than a year later with iMovie'11 (latest version 9.0.9) still exactly the same problem!! Just after archiving 16GB of camera files, I tried to import those files to make sure before deleting them. Whatever folder I tried to select within the archived hierarchy, the warning 'Folder is not a camera archive' appeared. (Rem.: all sub folders were not grayed out until the actual files it contains). Tried the solution 'restart iMovie' and suddenly during 'import from camera archive', selecting the same top folder grayed out all sub-folders and hitting 'import' worked as expected (as if camera is connected).

Thank you!

Paul

P.S.: reason why I use 'archive' is because for one reason or another, when using 'import' within iMovie all video files, which are already large enough when shooting HD, become suddenly 3 times bigger!! (1 sec footage of 2.8MB becomes more than 9MB; 1 hour footage 10.2GB becomes more than 34GB!!) But then I suppose I will have to search why in other threads