Saving in iMovie

I sent out an email to all of the student workers about how to save in iMovie, but I thought it would be good to post it here as well. 

There's no "File-- Save" option in iMovie-- because iMovie automatically saves your files, every time you make an edit. In order to save your iMovie project on an external hard drive to work on later, you need to make sure to save both the iMovie Projects and iMovie Events folders. If you only save the iMovie Projects folder, the next time you try to open your iMovie project, you'll get a "Source file missing" error message.

There are a couple of ways to save an iMovie project onto an external hard drive.

First way to save

In the upper left hand corner in your iMovie Project Window, you'll see a "Project Library" button. Click on it.

In the "Project Library" view, you'll see all of your available hard drives and iMovie projects. Select your iMovie project and drag and drop it into your external hard drive.

When you drag and drop your iMovie project into your external hard drive, you'll get this message:

Make sure to copy the project AND events. You need both in order to work on the iMovie project in the future. The Project folder contains a file that points to the raw video footage that's in the Events folder. If you don't copy the Events folder over along with the Project folder, you'll get a "Missing source file" error message.

Second way to save

Another way to save to an external hard drive is to go into the Movies folder (click on "Macintosh HD," select "macuser," and double click on the Movies folder). Drag and drop both the iMovie Events folder and iMovie Projects folder onto the external hard drive. 

If you tried saving your project using the first method, and notice that there are yellow exclamation marks on the external hard drive, this means that the hard drive isn't formatted in a file system that iMovie can read and write to. An external hard drive needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (which is the Mac-only format) in order for iMovie to be able to read and write to it. (To check and see how an external hard drive has been formatted, right-click on the hard drive and select "Get Info." The format information will be listed in the "General" section at the top.) 

If you're helping someone and they aren't able to check out one of our hard drives, you can save the iMovie Events and Projects folders onto a flash drive or external hard drive that's formatted as FAT32 (which is the format that's compatible with Macs and PCs). You'll have to go into the Movies folder and drag and drop the iMovie Events and Projects folders onto the flash drive or hard drive. The project will be saved, but the person won't be able to make changes to their project unless they move the project to an external hard drive that's been formatted as Mac OS Extended, or unless they drop their files into the Movies folder on their computer.

To double check that you've saved the iMovie project correctly, plug the external hard drive into another computer. If the project shows up with no errors, you're good to go. If you get an error message, double check to make sure that you've saved both the iMovie Events and Projects folders.