this was the post i found, i wish i could give this guy the credit on his post, so cut and paste of it was the next best thing. As you can see from the post date, nearly 3 years later and the issue still exsists. I don't think it effects many of us, but is worth knowing.
shawnabe
I had a heck of a time today trying to figure this out, spent about 12 hours. This string helped me the most. I had to go a few steps further to get a total fix for iMovie and my project and thought this might be useful for others who have similar problems w/ iMovie. I have been working on a particularly large project with many, many clips in one Event Folder. Today all of the sudden the sound and playback wouldn't respond when I hit the space bar, I couldn't view anything at all in the window viewer, eventually iMovie wouldn't open at all, and all I would get is the spinning beach ball. Had to force quit a hundred times. What worked for me was:
1. Freed up some space on my hard drive by pulling other events (which were not tied to any completed movies) to external HD. This may not have anything to do w/ the fix, but I ain't leavin it out after what I went through today.
2. With imovie closed, found where the Event Folder and associated Project I have been working on were saved on the hard drive...in my case I had them saved on the ext. HD. I highlighted the Event Folder and Project File separately, right clicked on each and moved them to trash. Remember-you are not deleting them by moving them to trash, just do NOT hit "Empty Trash". (If you drag somewhere else other than trash it will only create a copy and can take longer)
3. Followed John's advice above by going to User Library>Preferences folder and dragging the files named com.Apple.iMovie7.plist, and com.Apple.iMovie8.plist to my desktop. For me at this point I was able to open iMovie and navigate through my other events and projects. Space bar worked for sound and playback, viewer worked, iMovie running pretty efficiently.
4. I then went into my Trash folder, right clicked on the Events Folder and Project File separately and selected "Put Back" which places them right back in former location. I closed iMovie and re-opened.
What I found is that iMovie was not responding well because I had too many clips in one event folder. And with those same files now back in iMovie it will not take long for it to start acting funky. So I broke the event into 3 folders. While in iMovie I created 3 empty Event folders by clicking on File/new event (you might just need 2). I titled them Sports 1, Sports 2, Sports 3. Even though I still couldn't play or hear the Event clips/ project clips for this project, I was able to highlight approx 1/3 of the EVENT clips (not Project clips) by holding down the shift key and pointing the arrow/cursor across the appropriate clips. With the Sports Project back in iMovie, your Event folder should still show the green and orange highlights for your "favorite" and "imported" clips and should allow you to copy only those clips to the new, empty EVENT folders. Once I had highlighted and dragged the Event clips across 3 new event folders I was back to normal...can play, view, and hear all Event Clips and the Project clips. Best of all, I didn't have to re-start my project - of which I have spent a lot more than 12 hours on.
I hope this helps someone. Thanks to all on this string for pointing me in the right direction.
Shawn
I MAC, Mac OS X (10.6.3)
