Managing iMovie video files

Question

Level 1

18 points

Managing iMovie video files

I am trying to move iMovie files from my iMac hard drive to an external hard drive to free up drive space and improve performance (I hope.)

I am very afraid of losing valuable video I have taken with my camcorder.

So far, I have COPIED a bunch of clips from Movies/iMovie events to the external hard drive.

Here is where I start to have questions:

1. I have groups of clips (I think iMovie calls these events) in the iMovie app Library that do not appear in Finder (Movies/iMovie Library) and a group of clips in Movie/iMovie Library (in Finder) which do not appear in the iMovie Library in the app. Can someone explain how these can be different?

2. Once I get the mystery in 1. solved, is it possible, eventually, to move all the events and their clips to the external hard drive, but still be able to call them up in iMovie so that I can edit them, create projects, etc?

Thanks, in advance, for your help.

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on May 4, 2015 11:03 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

May 5, 2015 1:23 AM in response to KiwiniD

"I am very afraid of losing valuable video I have taken with my camcorder." Always make a backup of your iMovie events, projects and library folders. Especially before changing OS or iMovie versions. A memory stick will do if its big enough.

1. By default iMovie 9 stores its events at ~/Movies/iMovie events ( and projects at ~/Movies/iMovie projects).

iMovie 10 stores its events and projects in libraries, by default at ~/Movies/<library name>.imovielibrary. iMovie 10 libraries are packages, the contents of which can be seen by right-clicking "Show package contents".

I think you must have updated some events and projects to iMovie 10 but not all. Updated ones will appear in both locations. Non-updated ones will only be in the imovie 9 folders.

What you see in iMovie 10 is the contents of the libraries which are open, read from the libraries themselves. (You can have more than one library).

2. Transferring a library to an external HD is done from within iMovie 10. Details at: http://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.0.8/#/mov3fa25bae7

I hope this helps

Geoff.

Reply