Lost files... (Imovie Structure)

[Ian Sidle]

Where did you copy these files from? Did you make them in imovie?
Did you do an actual export of the movie (file-export) from within 
imovie or did you copy the files out of the imovie folder?

Well, if you did then all what you really copied was "aliases" to the 
real files.  For some reason, imovie stores its project files in an 
somewhat unusual way. The actual "project file" is an an quicktime 
movie reference file ("alias/shortcut"), that references the movie 
clips (from within their respective folders) with the appropriate 
timing/soundtrack/modifications to the videos that were done inside of 
imovie. The end result is, this file is very small (less then 100k) 
because it doesn't actually have any real video! Thats why you get the 
"MOV01033.MPG" not found e

Even more confusing, this file will play inside of quicktime! 
Misleading the user into thing that "whatever.mov" is the real deal, 
while in reality it is not.
The only real way to get useable files is to do "File -> Export -> To 
Quicktime" inside of imovie. The default settings "Web,Email,CDROM" is 
actually pretty sane settings. As always its best to go into advanced, 
if you have the time to tinker with it Beware- depending on the 
settings used can have a *dramatic* effect on the 
quality/size/compatibility of the output file

So I have an feeling, you burned an cd with the project .mov file. It 
would play back on your computer, because all of the real media files 
still exist on your hard drive. Then, thinking mission-accomplished and 
deleted all of those files to free up space and now it doesn't work 
anymore.

As for what can you do? Well, really matters how important the video 
is. Do you still have the original video (camcorder) tape? It would be 
an lot easier to just re-edit the whole thing. Not to mention, on the 
second time around you'll be more experienced and it will probably end 
up looking an bit better.

Norton unerase *might* be able to recover some of those files, but that 
depends on how long it has been and especially how much new data has 
been added to the hard disk sense then.

If you have also erased those tapes, then... your pretty much SOL 
"Sorry, Out of Luck".

If you just must *absolutley* must have the video back, then you can go 
to drive savers (http://www.drivesavers.com/).
They are NOT cheap, but if they can't do it no one can. Its probably 
best to just go directly to those guys if you are going that route, 
because if norton is unsuccessful then it probably would make it  
harder to recover the data.

thanks,
Ian Sidle