[MacDV] Help Lost Media

[Erica Sadun]

At 7:43 AM -0400 9/29/03, Eric Phillips wrote:
>This past weekend I spent three hours putting together a movie and now
>both iMovie and Quicktime cannot open the reference movie. When I try to
>open the project I get error messages for each clip and transition
>saying that it cannot find or open the files, I don't remember which it
>said. Everything was fine until I was messing around with things. First
>I was showing my wife how easy Toast6 was to add multiple movies and
>make buttons for a VCD. So I dragged the reference movie to the Toast6
>window and showed her how to select the frame I wanted for the button.
>Since I wasn't actually going to make a CD of this I deleted the movie
>out of Toast and closed Toast. I was making short 15-20min. home movies.
>Since I had many more clips to make the next movie from, new baby stuff,
>I created a new project in iMovie 3.0.3 then closed iMovie. I then
>opened the first media folder and selected all the unused clips that I
>wanted in the next movie. I then duplicated them and pasted then in the
>new media folder. The copy window that popped up said it would take 8
>minutes to complete. Not wanting to wait 8 minutes I stopped the process
>and deleted the three clips in the new media folder that did get copied.
>I then just dragged the clips from the old media folder to the new one.
>Then the old project would not open. I quickly moved everything back to
>the old media folder but it still would not work. What is in that media
>folder is the background music one or two transitions and the unused
>clips. Shouldn't the clips used in the movie still be in the media
>folder? Does anyone have an idea where I lost my media?

Make a copy of your iMovie project file. Then open it in
TextEdit. Scan through the file and make sure that all
the media actually appears in your original project Media
folder. I suspect you lost a clip or two along the way.

As a rule, don't mess with your Media folder unless you're
really confident about what you're doing.

As for the reference movie, it will rebuild when you open
and save your iMovie project.

-- Erica