Horrible iMovie 10 timestamp bug

Has anyone found a solution or workaround to this ridiculous bug? All my original files still have the correct timestamp as the name in finder when I go into the iMovie Library (show package contents).

Please report to Apple so they make sure this is on the radar: http://www.apple.com/feedback/imovie.html

Any one know if this was fixed with 10.0.2?

No.

Try posting more feedback!

I was wondering if anyone here had found a solution to the time stamp problem. My 13+ years of video of 3 kids is over 2TB of data, and needless to say the update to iMovie 10 was terrifying and I have experienced nothing like it in all my experience with Apple and I consider myself very computer and Apple literate, although by no means an expert.

After taking a one-to-one session on the new version, I decided I liked it enough to spend some significant time creating libraries by year in order to mimic the old arrangement by date. I even brought it my 27" iMac and two thunderbolt drives with all my data to another one-to-one session so they could help me get on the right track. Before getting very far, my iMovie updated automatically and gave me a message that it now added back the ability to sort by date, which was my biggest concern, so I upgraded and sure enough it now has them all sorted by date. Which would be excellent except now it has become very apparent that several random clips (sometimes in the middle of other continuous video) have time stamps off by as long as 11-13 years, and also off on date and time by a few days and about 12 hours. After reading these posts, I decided to view dates within the clips to quickly see and correct the time stamps where needed, which is a big project but nothing like what I was looking at doing before the recent upgrade, so I started working on it. BUT, after changing a couple time stamps on the iMovie 10 clips, closing the program and coming back to it (to see if it would then automatically move the event to the correct year and place), those clips now are black with a "?" and "Missing File" and suggesting I reimport the clips from the source data. Again, just terrifying! If I had deleted these files from my original iMovie Events in iMovie 9, they would be lost forever. Does anyone have an idea of what has gone wrong? I think my next step is just to remove iMove 10 and the new libraries and go back to the old iMovie until they come out with a completely new version that fixes all these problem. Unless anyone has an idea of how I can fix this. Thanks for any input.

It is obvious that this time stamp fix did not address all the issues. I am sticking with the previous version of iMovie. Apple really did bungle this upgrade badly, and some heads should roll over the rollout of this version. HORRIBLE.

As I said a few posts back, all videos prior to 2000 for me did not sort properly (the filename still has the correct timestamp in it). I didn't bother working with it and just stuck with the old version after trying to mess with it for a while.

emailsfh wrote:

As I said a few posts back, all videos prior to 2000 for me did not sort properly (the filename still has the correct timestamp in it). I didn't bother working with it and just stuck with the old version after trying to mess with it for a while.

Same here, but I wonder if something more should be done to make Apple aware of how disastrous their loyal customers think iMovie 10 is.

My library actually starts in 2000, and it still has multiple time stamp errors, and in such random and various locations I can't figure out any logic or reason for it. So disappointing but now I have deleted iMovie 10 and all the related files, I am back and happy with iMovie 9. I find iMovie 10 so embarassing as a loyal Apple enthusiast, I have to believe they know about the problem but that it is hugely challenging to fix and has something to do with the change in file format with the new app. I don't think I'll ever blindly upgrade an apple software product again. Thanks all for your input.

ikeeling -- I had the same problem with re-dated clips going missing. I just filled out the imovie bug report form. Seems like I have found at least three different people mentioning these problems on forums just this month. Luckily I still have the old files but I don't want to have to import them all again and even if I do I cannot date them correctly without the files disappearing. I have tried reimporting and the same thing happens when I go to re-date. Strange though there seems to be a delay -- I can re-date the clip and see it move to the correct year. I can still see the clip and even play it. Then at some point it switches to the Missing File ? for the whole clip. Very strange.

Thank you for the suggestion, I used the link and also filed a bug report. Kap802 this is exactly what is happening to my clips as well. Hoping they will get it right since I liked the layout and use of the new iMovie 10.

I've had the same problems, and reverted to version 9 as most people recommended, so that my 1961-2013 files are correctly catalogued. One problem. I had struggled through on version 10 for a month in 2014, and as a result I have 5 Events and a few Projects in the iMovie 10 Library for 2014. There seems no way to load the footage and the movies directly into iMovie 9 from my folders because the iMovie 10 Library only opens with iMovie 10! Any recommendations?

There's no official way of transferring events created in iMovie 10 to iMovie 9. Its probably safest to re-import your clips into imovie 9.

(If you look inot your iMovie 10 library (select and right-click - show package contents) you will find a folder "Original Media". These could be copied into iMovie 9 but I don't know whether they will have correct timestamps - quite likely not).

Geoff.

iMovie 10.0.6 fixed this for me--yay (and finally)! Here's the basic process that I followed (I did some of these steps a few times before I realized how to fix the issue I'll mention, so my actual process wasn't quite this straightforward, but this should work):

1. Updated to iMovie 10.0.6
2. Trashed files created by the previous version of iMovie 10: iMovie Library.imovielibrary and iMovie Theater.theater in the Movies folder, UpdatedToiMovie10 in the iMovie Events folder, and UpdatedToiMovie10 in the iMovie Projects folder. I also deleted the iMovie Preferences file, but I don't think that would have been necessary.
3. Launched iMovie 10 and selected File > Update Projects and Events...
4. Once that was done, I noticed that that the clip dates and times (via Modify > Adjust Clip Date and Time...) for all my old videos were finally correct (as opposed to showing the import date and time). I also noticed that some of my old videos were now in the correct year categories in theLibraries pane on the left (with View > Sort Events By > Newest to Oldest selected). However, not all of them were.
5. After some trial and error, I finally found a way to get these wrongly categorized Events back into the right years. For each problem event, I would move all its clips into an empty event (which I manually added). This would cause both the new event and the old event from which I moved the clips to be put into the right year category. I would then move all the clips back into their old event, and everything stayed in the right place. I repeated this for each problem event (using the single empty event over and over to move the clips into before moving them back), and now all my events are back in the right year categories!

I hope this works for others with this issue.

That's very good news, Jay, thank you for the update!

I immediately downgraded to iMovie 9.0.9 when I discovered this issue. Would you recommend an upgrade now? (For what reason?)

I'm not really a power iMovie user, so making sure the feature set was exactly the same wasn't a big issue for me. Primarily, I just wanted to be on the latest version for future proofing reasons.