Source clip DELETED!!!? SH** :O

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Source clip DELETED!!!? SH** :O

I have a lot of video on my computer. I thought myself pretty smart by editing what I could use together, and then deleting the original files. Every time I have completed a project, I've gone back into iPhoto and deleted the original clips to make room. GENIUS, right!?

Now, I figure out, the projects won't play...

Man...this was so dumb. Luckily I've already managed to upload some to iTunes and facebook, and so they aren't LOSTlost - just lost..

The projects are still all there in iMovie, I can see them, but they won't play, and all the clips have got that small #%€§?#€ yellow triangle at the corner.

I even went as far as clearing out the trash can last night, so I can't even conjure up the files again.

I sooo thought that the projects would "automatically" be saved as an entirely different file, or whatever.

If someone could help, I'd be really REALLY grateful.

Is there something I am missing, or am I truly screwed?

iMovie '09-OTHER

Posted on Jun 4, 2013 2:10 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 4, 2013 3:00 PM in response to DKDude

Yes you are screwed.

If you uploaded some to YouTube or FaceBook, you may be able to salvage something. Also, if you Finalized or shared to iTunes or Media Browser, there may be a copy in iTunes or in the Project package.

To look for a copy of the finished movie in the Project package, find one of your projects in the Movies/iMovie Project folder. Right-click on it and select SHOW PACKAGE CONTENTS. Look in the Movies folder of the package, and if you finalized or shared, there may be a copy of the finished movie in there.

The way iMovie works is that the raw video cips are stored in iMovie Events (they can also be stored in iPhoto Events). They are only stored once, but multiple projects can access them.

A Project in iMovie is really just a text file in hexadecimal that references the event clips. For example,

"Go get clip A from Event 1 and take frames 30 through 315. Add a title with these words starting at frame 50. Add a music track, which you can find in iTunes, starting at the second clip. Add a transition here. Correct the color there." etc. etc.

The benefit of this is that for the large video files, you only have to store them once, not each time you make a project. (For older versions of iMovie - 2006 and before, if you used a clip in 5 projects, you had to store the clip 5 times. Back then, must people stored to tape because hard drives were so small and expensive so nobody worried about it. But today, with large, fast hard drives, most people store video to disk rather than to tape.

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