Projects are stored in events (??) So where are they?

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Level 2

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Projects are stored in events (??) So where are they?

I find the way that events and projects are organized in iMovie 10 to be rather incomprehensible. I couldn't even get started (although I'm an old iMovie hand) until I bought "iMovie: The Missing Manual" by Pogue.

In that book he says that projects are stored in events. This doesn't make much sense to me; in earlier versions of iMovie projects were stored in their own separate area, which made a lot of sense because projects (at least mine) were generally made up of clips spanning many events, so it wouldn't have made sense to store them in one of those events. In any case, in iMovie 10, in what sense are projects stored in events? I made a new event, and imported some video. Now I want to make a project using this video. I made sure this event was selected, then chose File/New Movie... to make a new movie (which is the same as a project, I think). When I did this, there was no way to force the new movie (or project) to be stored in the event I just made. So where is it?

According to Pogue, if I open a project, then a movie "clapper" icon is supposed to appear next to the event in which the project is stored, but I don't see any such icon. If I go to my event, there's no icon or any other link to the project I just made. As far as I can can tell, all projects are just stored in one large flat "folder", which is visible when I go to the Projects screen.

What am I missing?

Posted on Nov 29, 2015 5:12 PM

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Answer 1

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

Nov 30, 2015 4:32 AM in response to Stuart Field

This has all changed with iMovie 10.1 though I've yet to see the change explained anywhere and I had to find out by exploring.

Up until 10.1 projects were indeed stored within events (just like FCP X does). With 10.1, projects are now independent of events, which as you point out is quite logical. (If you look into a 10.1 library you can see that there a re now separate folders for events and for projects, rather than projects as sub-foders in event folders.)

As before, raw media can be imported into an event, in which case they are available to any project in the same library. But now they can alternatively be imported into a project. In this case these 'local' media are only available to this project . The 'gotcha' is that and if you delete the project these media are also deleted. Any media dragged and dropped directly into a project timeline are in this new category. The new 'Project Media' pane above the Libraries pane shows all media used by the currently loaded project whether they are from an event, a library from a different application or local to the project (the new category). I have not found a way (within iMovie) to move or copy 'local' project media to an event, so it seems to me that this category is only of use in cases where you only ever want to use the media in one project.

Geoff.

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