Section 4.7. Managing Project Files

4.7. Managing Project Files

In the iMovie HD era, your movie may appear on the hard drive in one of two formats.

If it's a new iMovie HD project, it's represented on your hard drive by a single file icon (see Figure 4-13, top). Having a single-icon project document makes it very convenient to open , copy, delete, rename, or move a video project, because you have only one icon to worry about.
If it's an older iMovie project that you've opened into iMovie HD, it remains just as it was: as a folder full of associated files (Figure 4-13, bottom).

You can read more about this distinction later in the chapter. But first, the basics of opening, switching, and converting movie projects.

4.7.1. Starting a New Project

To start a new project after you've been editing another one, choose File New Project; indicate whether or not you want to save the changes to your outgoing movie (if you havent already saved them); and off you go.

4.7.2. Switching Projects

To open a different iMovie Project, you can choose either of two routes:

Close the current project's window. You return to the Create Project dialog box shown in Figure 4-3. Click Open Existing Project. Now you're shown the contents of your hard drive, so that you can find and open the iMovie project you want.

Figure 4-13. Top: An iMovie HD project is a single document icon on your hard drive if it began life inside iMovie HD. If it began life in a previous version of iMovie, it was, and still is, a project folder.
Bottom: If you open one of those project folders, you find a long list of files. Don't move or rename any of them. It's worth knowing, though, which ones to open. For example, the iMovie document icon with the shortest name is the actual, live, current iMovie HD projectthe only one you should open.

Choose File Open Project. Once again, use the resulting dialog box to find the movie you want.
Choose File Open Recent, whose submenu lists the last few movies youve worked on.

In each case, if you've worked on the current movie but haven't saved the changes yet, iMovie asks you whether you'd like to save them or not. Click Save or Don't Save, as appropriate.

Tip: If you're a keyboard-shortcut fan, you can press

-D instead of clicking Don't Save.

After a moment, the new movie's clips appear on the screen, and you're ready to go.

4.8. Converting Older Projects

When you open a project created by an older version of the program, iMovie asks permission to update its file format into the iMovie HD format, as shown in Figure 4-14. If you want to edit the project in iMovie HD, you have no choice; you must click OK. Doing so creates a new project file, and preserves a copy of the original with the filename suffix ". iMovie2Project" (see Figure 4-13, bottom).

Figure 4-14. Top: When you open an older iMovie project, this message appears.
Bottom: Sometimes, opening an older project produces this message, which refers to clips that are still in the Trash. For details, see page 127.

Now, even if you click OK, your old iMovie project folder doesn't get turned into the new-style, single-icon project file as described earlier. Instead, iMovie HD leaves you with the original project folder, with a few new files and folders deposited there for safety. (See Figure 4-13 for an illustration. )

For example, suppose you try to open an iMovie 4 project called Cruise. You get the message shown in Figure 4-14. You click OK.

When the conversion is finished, you still have a document inside called Cruise. That's your new iMovie HD project file, the one you should double-click the next time you want to open it (identified in Figure 4-13 at bottom).

Your converted project folder also contains a copy of the old, untouched original, now called Vacation. iMovie2Project. That's a backup copy of your original, which iMovie HD thought fully deposits there just in case.

Note: Be careful, in the future, not to open the Vacation. iMovie2Project document by mistake. If you try, iMovie will offer to convert it to iMovie HD format again, you'll spin out a second backup copy, and you'll wonder why the editing you did in iMovie HD yesterday isn't showing up. Don't open the version with the ~symbol, either (Vacation. ~iMovieProj); that's your "Revert to Saved" copy, an older draft that iMovie maintains for its own backtracking purposes.

So what if you do want iMovie to convert the old project folder into the new-style, single-icon document? After you've opened it up, choose File Save Project As. Type a name for the newly created package icon and then click Save. After a couple of minutes of file copying and hard drive filling, you wind up with both the old project folder and the new package icon. (If the conversion goes well, you can now delete the older project folder.)