Hunting for missing iMovie clips

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Level 2

248 points

Hunting for missing iMovie clips

In iMovie I have some missing clips. Quite important as they are my sons early years, so we are talking about small videos shot on my Canon S60 camera back in early 00s. So I'm hunting high and low for these clips. iMovie has decided to rename them to an odd name. ie. in one folder one clip is present, the other clip is missing. The present clips is called clip-2003-09-05 01;26;47. The one which is missing is called clip-2003-09-05 01;29;52.

I can find the present clip by selecting file/reveal in finder. It is a .dv file. However, if I do a search for it on my Mac, it's not found. Therefore, I have no hope of finding the missing clip by doing a search....

If I select the missing clip and select file/reveal in finder, I get a message to say it can't be found.

I need to find out what this clip was originally called, before it was renamed by iMovie. Then I might have a chance of finding it. I think it would have originally been a .avi file. Is there a way to discover what it was called before iMovie renamed it somewhere along the line?

Any help would be appreciated. I'm on High Sierra 10.13.4 and iMovie 10.1.9.

iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13), (27-inch, Late 2013)

Posted on Apr 14, 2018 1:14 AM

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Answer 1

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Apr 14, 2018 7:37 AM in response to Kathykate

Hi, Kathykate,

I don't know how you can find the original name of the file, unless you have it stored someplace outside of the iMovie system, perhaps in a backup folder, or Time Machine, in another app, or in an earlier iMovie version. In which case you can restore or drag the clip to your desktop from wherever it is located.

Possibly the file was deleted somehow. A normal finder search might not find files stored in the iMovie Original Media folder. You can try searching by Created Date rather than name.

Possibly you have some corruption in your iMovie library. Try looking in the iMovie backups folder for a previously saved library. Open that library and see if you can locate your clip there. To get to the backups folder, follow this path: Go/Home/Library/Containers/com.apple.iMovieApp/Data/Library/Caches/iMovie Backups. When you get there you will see a list of previously backed up libraries. Click on some earlier ones to open iMovie, and do a search there.

-- Rich

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Hunting for missing iMovie clips

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