iMovie says"Missing camera" (iPhone), video clips lost?

Question

iMovie says"Missing camera" (iPhone), video clips lost?

So, I have an iPhone4 and a Mac with iMovie 10.0.5.

My usual work flow to get media off my phone and onto my Mac is to use Image Capture. I use Image Capture to import all the pics/videos into a file on my Mac. Then I delete everything on my phone through Image Capture.

I import the movie clips from that folder to an event in iMovie to edit movies. Sometimes I try to go and then delete the movie clips from the source folder. Sometimes this means the movie clips are no longer accessible in iMovie, "source missing," and sometimes it's just fine. WHY?

Today I did something a little different and find myself screwed!

Instead of going through the temp folder storage I usually make on my laptop, today I went directly from the camera to the Import window that automatically comes up in iMovie. I figured if I imported here, and they all show up here in iMovie, then it must be safe to delete the originals on my phone through the Image Capture.

OH NO! Needless to say, the originals are deleted, and the supposed "imports" on iMovie in an event with today's date, are just empty shells with that dreaded question mark and the message "camera missing." Of course, one of the movie clips from the same event is just hunky dory. Seems totally random as that was the last one that would have been imported. And it's not the sweet little pre-K graduation one I would have hoped for. WAHH!

Why doesn't IMPORT mean import?

I've seen this theme from others here before, but it sounds like they are usually lucky enough to have only unplugged their phone not totally deleted the originals like I have...

I've looked in my iMovie Library folder and only see small files where the movies should be, so it looks like it has no originals either. Could they be recoverable anywhere??? From Image Capture? From my phone? From iMovie? From the bowels of my Mac?

Thanks to all and good night.

Posted on Jun 26, 2015 5:43 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

Jun 27, 2015 2:19 AM in response to sleepyhollowkm

Select your iMovie library with the Finder and right-click > show package contents. There will be folders for each event. Open the folder for the problem event and you should see a folder entitled "Original Media". This is where iMovie stores raw clips that have been successfully imported. Imports from cameras and files already on the Mac are copied here. On the other hand, clips from iMovie effects, iTunes, iPhoto etc libraries are not copied but aliases (links) to the media files are placed in the original media folder. It seems that this can go wrong occasionally when importing from a camera, for example if the import is interrupted or the camera disconnected with out ejecting it first but there may be other causes as well.

If your clips are not in the library and you don't have a backup of your iPhone media then I think you have lost them. It is always advisable to make sure one has a tested copy and a backup of any important files before deleting an original.

I hope this may help

Geoff.

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Answer 2

Jun 27, 2015 12:02 PM in response to GeeD

Thanks for your response. Indeed, the files are not in the originals, but a few from that upload are. So I guess a further question would be why does this seem to be such a toss up each time I do this whether they really import or are just aliases. I am not disconnecting incorrectly or too soon. Every time I migrate stuff, some really makes it over, some doesn't for no apparent reason.

Thanks again!

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Answer 3

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

Jun 27, 2015 4:41 PM in response to sleepyhollowkm

I don't know much more than what I have already said but this is a frequently reported problem though I never experienced it myself. It also seems that once the problem has occurred, subsequent imports to the library also fail and to get around it a new library has to be created.

If you first copy the camera contents or card contents to the computer you can simply drag and drop the files into an iMovie event pane, avoiding the import function altogether.

Geoff.

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Answer 4

Jun 27, 2015 5:38 PM in response to GeeD

Good tip. I'll try dragging them in. Thanks so much!

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