imovie is not finding my clips from external hard drive

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imovie is not finding my clips from external hard drive

I had imovies backed up to an external hard drive before my Mac crashed. Had Mac factory restored and am trying to import my clips back into Imovie. Right now, I can only import manually through Finder and have to select each individual event and import one at a time. Otherwise, if I select them all, it puts them in one event. My external hard drive appears in the Event Library, but there is nothing when I select it. On the external hard drive, my movie clips are located in a folder called IMovie Events, then there are sub folders with each event - this seems right. Can someone help me with why my clips are not showing up? Otherwise its going to take a long time to import each event manually. Thanks for your help.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Nov 25, 2012 1:46 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 25, 2012 4:10 PM in response to randjelovic

As you noted, they must be in the iMovie Events folder at the top level of the external drive. Projects must be in the iMovie Projects folder at the top level of the external drive.

Also, the external drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled). FAT32 drives will not work, but can be reformatted. For instructions, see here.

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4362

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Answer 2

randjelovic Author

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Nov 25, 2012 5:59 PM in response to AppleMan1958

Just so I fully understand, what do you mean by the folder needs to be at the top level?

I checked the box of the hard drive, it 's PC & Mac compatible. Specs indicate Mac OS X (tiger, leapard, snow leapard, and lion) with included NTFS driver for Mac. Is this not the same as mentioned above? It's the hard drive Best Buy used when backing up my info when computer crashed.

Thanks again, much appreciated.

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Answer 3

Nov 25, 2012 6:49 PM in response to randjelovic

OK on your internal drive Events will be in the Macintosh HD/<your user name>/Movies/iMovie Events folder.

On an external drive, they must be in the iMovie Events folder. They cannot be inside any other folder.

Each event will be in a separate folder within the iMovie Events folder.

From your description, your drive will not work with iMovie. It will work fine for most things with a Mac, but it will not work with video applications like iMovie or Final Cut Pro.

You can reformat it so that it works with iMovie, but be aware that in the process of formatting it, you will lose anything that is currently stored on the drive. The instructions for reformatting are in the link in my previous post.

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