I lost all video footage from my Alaska Cruise, so mad at myself.

[jetlagged]

I was working on my videos using iMovie on my MBA 13" 2012, for my Alaska cruise that I took this summer because I like to upload and share them on youtube (I used my iPhone 5 to shoot videos and take pics since I didn't have a camera at the time) and at the same time i was cleaning up my MBA and deleting photos in my notebook that I've already saved to my external hard drive to free up space.

I imported all my photos and videos to iPhoto. After that I exported the pictures to a folder I created under Pictures. And I exported the movie files to a folder under movies. Afterwards I created an event in iMovie and imported all those movie files to iMovie so I could start editing

Then I deleted everything on iPhoto. And for some reason, it deleted the actual movie files also. The only thing that's left is the audio when I go to iMovie, the actual clips themselves are just black. I am so mad and angry. i already emptied the trash so I can't go back and restore it.

Man I feel sick to my stomach. Normally I would go to iPhoto and copy the files and paste them to a folder. That ensures the full movie files gets moved also. I don't know why I decided to export them instead because that only moved the audio after reviewing my mistake. but since I deleted everything in iPhoto, it also deleted the actual videos. There goes nearly 3 hours of video footage in that weeklong cruise.

 

[blueroom]

I take it you don't have Time Machine running or any sort of backup.

 

[jetlagged]

I take it you don't have Time Machine running or any sort of backup.

Sadly no. Normally I'm very careful to make copies of my photos and videos and save them to my external hard drive before deleting them. But I just didn't understand the difference between copying the movie files vs exporting the movie files. Now that I figured out my mistake, exporting movie files from iPhoto to a folder outside of it doesn't move the whole file, just the audio.

But I could still work on the video files in iMovie as long as I didn't delete the events that I created in iPhoto. what I should have done is copy those files and pasted them to the folder because that moves the whole file and I can delete the movie files in iPhoto. This was something I learned after I found out that I couldn't work on my iMovie files after I deleted all the events in iMovie.

If anything positive comes out of this, it's a good learning experience on my part. Plus I still have the photos saved, which I suppose is better than nothing at all.

 

[juanm]

Yup. I've long been of the opinion that for this kind of potentially fatal actions, software makers should make a small schematic drawing explaining graphically what you're doing. In the pro software users are supposed to know, but they should always assume an amateur doesn't know how files are managed internally, and what "moving", "exporting" and that kind of words actually mean.