iMovie Theatre -- Moving to a New Location

Same problem. I have no space left on my local drive and my cpu usage is near 100%.

Same problem.

I haven't had time to mess with this yet (hopefully this weekend), but I would hope that there would be a way to do this from within iMovie. In iMovie 9.x, the safest way to move the iMovie events or projects was from inside the iMovie application itself. I stupidly did it once in Finder, and the result was most of my events ended up with visual aberations and artifacts (apparently the Apple Intermediate Codec formatted videos got corrupted somehow in the transfer). Luckily I have the original video to re-import, but what a hassle. Never had any problems when I've moved events from within iMovie.

I assume if I just drag the iMovie Theater package to the external HD in the finder, that will screw things up. Anyone tried that yet?

I tried but that changed nothing.

I moved the file to another hard disc. The next time you start iMovie, there are no movies in the teather anymore.

You can move your theater file back to the main harddrive and they are back.

If you have your original Theather file still in another place when you publish a new movie to the theater, imovie creates a new theater file on the main hard disc.

Has anyone tried moving the file then creating a soft link back to its original location?

I've tried to create a link, and it works fine! Do the following:

1. Move iMovie Theater to new location.
2. Open Terminal Window.
3. Type: ln -s (new location directory)/iMovie\ Theater.theater ~/Movies/iMovie\ Theater.theater
   ex: ln -s /Volumes/External\ Drive/iMovie\ Theater.theater ~/Movies/iMovie\ Theater.theater
4. Hit return
5. Done!

It looks like you may be able to use the same technique for moving the iPhoto library, and it looks like iMovie treats files the same way that iPhoto and iTunes do now -- makes a library containing all the movies, so you don't tneed the orginal folders. Anyway, move the iMovie library file to your external drive, then hold the option key while opening iMovie. Then tell it which library to open. I deleted the duplicate imovie library1 and the file "coverted to imovie 10" before doing so, so I should be essentially starting over. It seemed to work -- though I had to play around with the content before I finally ended up with only one library.

Hi Frank,

I am just too stupid to do it as I don't play with terminal commands very often. If I want to move the iMovie Theatre to the Volume "Archive" what do I have to do?

ln -s (Archive)/iMovie\ Theater.theater ~/Movies/iMovie\ Theater.theater

ex: ln -s /Volumes/External\ Drive/iMovie\ Theater.theater ~/Movies/iMovie\ Theater.theater

Do I have to copy the entire thing in one line or do I have to hit return twice? Sorry for asking but I just can't handle it. I don't even get what "ex:" means.

Thanks in advance

Thomas

ex: means for example.

Here's a step by step:

1. Move the Theater file from your Movies folder (inside the home folder) to the new location.

2. Delete the Theater file from your Movies folder.

3. Go to Applications/Utilities and double-click on Terminal

4. Type in ln -s (note that this is lowercase LN -s followed by a space)

5. Drag the Theater file (that you put in the new location) to the Terminal window.

6. Still in Terminal type (or copy/paste) the following: ~/Movies/iMovie\ Theater.theater

7. Hit return.

(dragging the Theater file into the Terminal window fills in the path for you.)

Thank you so much! It worked just fine. Actually it created an "alias" or "symlink" in the old folder. I tried both before using cmd L in finder (alias) and services/create symbolic link (context menue mouse). In this case it just did not work. iMovie recreated the theatre each time I opened it. This drove me nuts because this method (symbolic link) works with iPhoto perfectly well (thumbnails - data.noindex stuff on external HDD because the video previews scallowed to much space).

Anyhow. Thanks! What more can I say :-)

Thanks for that.

If in the future I want to undo this and go back to my hard drvie how do I do this?

David

I suppose that this is pretty easy. Erase the alias and move the Theatre back to it's old location :-)

Thanks Alan

See: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5732826?answerId=24682004022#24682004022

I followed these steps a few times because I keep getting "your start up disk is full' window, however now when I click on imovie the 'theater' is empty if I double click on imovie theater on the external HD i get this

if I right click- get info- on it in the external HD it says there is 33gig. so the file is there....

How is this helping?

All its doing it pointing to where to look for the library its still saving the video on the main drive from iCloud when it opens

I used your instructions once you delete the file after moving it and using terminal. Once you open iMovie again it recreates the file again in movies as a alias thats all fine but it still downloads the library to your main hard drive again taking up space rather then saving to the second hard drive