Q: Trimmed clips say they are saving, but the files do not appear where Quicktime says they are saved

I have a large video that I am trimming into shorter sections. I had saved several sections, and decided I wanted to go back and watch one of them. The clips weren't where I had saved them. When I went to "recent files" in Quicktime, they were all there, and when I traced their location, they said they were in the folder I had saved them to. But this folder is empty and none of the clips are there! I tried several ways of saving, saving to several other locations, and duplicating the clip and resaving. None of them resulted in any file I could locate.