Section B.9. Project Corruption


B.9. Project Corruption

Most of the time, iMovie stops people's hearts only with the beauty and magnificence of its creations. Unfortunately, every now and then, it can stop your heart in a much more terrifying way. At some random moment when you least expect it, some iMovie project that you've worked on for days or weeks refuses to open .

The odds of project corruption in iMovie HD are lower than in any previous version, but if it happens, that's little consolation.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How to Save Your Project for Future Generations

OK, I'm done editing my iMovie. How do I back up my project to reclaim the hard drive space?

That's an excellent question. Considering the hours you've probably spent building your masterpiece, preserving a full-quality copy, preferably in editable form, is probably extremely important.

(As you know, exporting the movie to QuickTime, cellphones, the Web, or VHS entails a huge deterioration in video and audio quality. Surprisingly, even burning to DVD involves losing some of the original quality, because the video is stored on the disc in a compressed form.)

In the end, there are only three ways to preserve a movie at its full original quality.

First, you can store it on a hard drive. This method is getting less expensive every day, and offers fast and convenient storage of your entire project. Because you can store your entire project package or folder, you'll be able to re-edit the project next year when iMovie 6 comes out with enhancements you can't resist.

Second, you can use a backup program like Retrospect to copy your project folder onto multiple DVDs (not video DVDs, but DVD-ROMslike glorified blank CDs). It takes a handful of these blanks to store one hour of video. But this solution is certainly cheap. And in a pinch , you'll be able to reconstruct your entire project folder, with full editing capability.

If the project is small enough to fit on a DVD, you can use the Burn Project to Disc command described on page 464.

Finally, you can send the movie back out to your DV camcorder, as described in Chapter 11. MiniDV tapes have about a 15-year life span, but they store the original video quality, even if you rescue the footage by copying it onto a fresh tape once every 10 years .

You lose the ability to edit your titles and substitute new background music, of course, but you don't lose all editing possibilities. If you ever re-import that movie back to iMovie, most of the clips will still appear as distinct, rearrangeable clips in your Movie Track (because clip boundaries are nothing more than breaks in the originally recorded time code).

(The exception: Clips that you create within iMovie, as opposed to those captured from a camcorder, don't have a time stamp, so they'll re-import as one conjoined clump of scenes.)


B.9.1. Using the Timeline Movie to Recover the Project

If the worst should happen, you may be able to rescue the project by importing its timeline movie to a new, fresh, iMovie project file. (More on the timeline movie in a moment.)

If you read page 112, you know that the modern iMovie "document" is, in fact, a tricky kind of folder. To open it, Control-click the project's Finder icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Show Package Contents. In the window that opens, double-click the Cache icon. Inside, you'll see an icon called Timeline Movie.mov.

The Timeline Movie is a reference movie. That is, it contains no video or audio of its ownjust pointers to the video and audio files stored in the package's Media folder. If those files are intact, then the reference movie will play the project just as iMovie HD did.

Create a new iMovie project, and then drag the Timeline Movie.mov icon from the Finder window right into the Timeline Viewer of the new project.

Now, the resulting movie will contain all of the original movie project, but you should be aware that it will show up in the new project as a single, giant clip. You won't be able to edit the titles and transitions, but at least everything will play in the proper order.



iMovie HD & iDVD 5. The Missing Manual
iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100337
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 209
Authors: David Pogue

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