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iMovie, HELP! before I kill myself! ^_^

A

AndreaHalsey

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 26, 2008
6
0
I have a macbook and an iMac here and I have successfully imported .avi movie clips from my video camera into iMovie on the laptop HOWEVER I would prefer to work on my 24" iMac but I have spent ALL day trying to figure out why I cannot import the .avi files.

At this point, I have finally gotten it to "import" the .avi files but it will not make movie thumbnails, thus, never shows up in my Event Library for me to use. I even copied the thumbnail files from the laptop and moved it to the same folder on my iMac but no luck, I still do not see any clips to play with.

So... please help before I kill myself!!! THANKS ^_^
iMovie v 7.1.2
 
Does copying the iMovie Projects in the Movies folder of your user folder from the laptop to the imac work? (I haven't actually investigated where the data is located.)
 
Not sure, I don't think that is related because I haven't started a project yet. iMovie successfully creates a new event, a new folder, and moves all the .avi files into the iMovie Events folder but it does not create thumbnails. It says it does "Creating Thumbnails .... wait a few seconds" but it moves much too fast to be actually creating them anyways. And then it acts like it is done but there are no clips to look at, and no thumbnails in the iMovie Events folder where they should be. On my laptop, it took 15 minutes or so to generate all the thumbnails, and they are there in the folder when completed. However, on my iMac there are none.

I thought I'd be clever and just copy the thumbnails my laptop made and transfer them into the iMovie Events folder on this computer, but still no luck.

Any point in the right direction is much appreciated!!
 
Ok this is just plain making me crazy! I copied the entire folder from the laptop iMovie Events folder (called My Clips) inside the folder were all the .avi files, then two additional folders: Cache and Thumbnails. I deleted my previous (unsuccessful) event from iMovie on my main computer and then transferred the entire My Clips folder over (everything). I restarted iMovie, yes, there it was! But no clips!!!! AAAAH! Everything is right there as it should be but no clips are showing for me to play with.

I was hoping it'd be something super-simple like the "Show pop-up" menu it keeps telling me about, but I have tried them all and I assume "Show: All Clips" would suffice. Nothing is there though.

The exact message I get in the main box is:
No Matching Video
Choose a different option from the Show Pop Up menu at the lower left corner.

So if anyone has experienced this at all or even has a clue, I would love to know what to do from here!!! ^_^
Thanks
 
Right, but when I copied it all over, there were no clips or thumbnails viewable by iMovie. I still have the problem and can't figure it out :(
 
I think I know what the problem might be.

Do you, by any chance, have Flip4Mac and/or Perian installed on the 'book but NOT on the iMac? If this is the case, then iMovie might be failing to understand how to read the movie files (it defers to QuickTime for this task - if QuickTime can't read the file then iMovie will give up as well).
 
Finally! A point in the right direction, lol. Now I am looking into possibly the camera's software not having been installed on the iMac. The actual camera I am using is the FlipVideo camera, is that the same thing you mentioned Flip4Mac? I am downloading from their site now and will test it out in a few minutes!
 
AndreaHalsey said:
Finally! A point in the right direction, lol. Now I am looking into possibly the camera's software not having been installed on the iMac. The actual camera I am using is the FlipVideo camera, is that the same thing you mentioned Flip4Mac? I am downloading from their site now and will test it out in a few minutes!
Click to expand...
Nope. Flip4Mac is for playing WMV files (and certain kinds of AVI files) on the Mac through QuickTime.
 
I'm having the same issue after upgrading from iLife 08. If anybody figures this out, please post your solution here.
 
Found my solution!

I solved this one, with some help from another forum.

Go to the directory

Hard Disk/Library/Quicktime

and remove all files that do not begin with "Apple." (Not the Library Folder in the Users folder.)

In my case, I narrowed it down further to this file:

QuickTimeComponents.component

After removing this file, I can now import movies without a problem! Hope this helps you as well.
 
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