iMovie Library Corrupted

[getrealbro]

I just finished rebuilding an iMovie Library — AGAIN. I still don’t know how iMovie Libraries get corrupted. But I’ve learned to keep backups of un-corrupted iMovie libraries (in addition to Time Machine) so that they can be used as a foundation for the rebuild. Luckily the recent projects in my current, corrupted library were OK. So I created a good iMovie library by copying these recent projects from my current, corrupted library into a copy of an older, un-corrupted library.

In the rebuilding process, I discovered that in the latest version of iMovie, the File menu items for copying or moving a project from one library to another were always greyed out and non functional. But the pop-up menu in the Projects view still worked.

BTW the corrupted iMovie Library looked OK in Projects view. But almost all of the older projects were missing their media files (i.e..mov). Inside the iMovie Library package, these missing media files had been replaced with an alias that pointed to itself — DUH.

Have any of your iMovie Libraries been corrupted? If so, how did you rebuild/recover it/them?

GetRealBro

 

[AZhappyjack]

I just finished rebuilding an iMovie Library — AGAIN. I still don’t know how iMovie Libraries get corrupted. But I’ve learned to keep backups of un-corrupted iMovie libraries (in addition to Time Machine) so that they can be used as a foundation for the rebuild. Luckily the recent projects in my current, corrupted library were OK. So I created a good iMovie library by copying these recent projects from my current, corrupted library into a copy of an older, un-corrupted library.

In the rebuilding process, I discovered that in the latest version of iMovie, the File menu items for copying or moving a project from one library to another were always greyed out and non functional. But the pop-up menu in the Projects view still worked.

BTW the corrupted iMovie Library looked OK in Projects view. But almost all of the older projects were missing their media files (i.e..mov). Inside the iMovie Library package, these missing media files had been replaced with an alias that pointed to itself — DUH.

Have any of your iMovie Libraries been corrupted? If so, how did you rebuild/recover it/them?

GetRealBro

I don't use iMovie... my preference is FinalCut Pro x, and I have never had a problem like you describe with iMovie on my FCPx libraries. Sorry.

 

[getrealbro]

I don't use iMovie... my preference is FinalCut Pro x, and I have never had a problem like you describe with iMovie on my FCPx libraries. Sorry.

Thanks for the reply.

Final Cut Pro is way more (capable and expensive) than I need. I mostly just need to trim and/or crop very short videos that I take of the wildlife on our property.

For those still interested…
The iMovie library that got corrupted is several years old and has gone through several iMovie “updates”. The library package is a mess inside. Most of the projects, with their original media, are stuffed in the folder for just one of the projects.

I decided to just archive this iMovie Library to keep it out of harms way and start a new iMovie Library for the more recent projects. Since iMovie allows you to open several libraries at the same time, I can get back to these older projects if I really need to.

I still haven’t figured out why, even with brand new Libraries, the File>Copy to Library and File>Move to Library menu pop-out selections are greyed out. But the same selections in the Project’s popup menu work just fine.

GetRealBro

 

[Dave Braine]

I've been using iMovie for years and have never had a problem with the Library.

 

[Partron22]

Your Lib may have gotten subtly corrupted back in 1976, or whenever you started using iMovie, or possibly during one of the 50 or so updates its been through. One glitch is all it takes.

Exporting everything, killing the database, App and prefs. Reinstalling and reconstructing might solve your troubles.
Personally I try to stay away from these Apps with mysterious internal databases as much as possible.
They make debugging too hard.

 

[getrealbro]

Thanks all for your replies.

Up until 6 months ago I would have posted that I had never had trouble with iMovie libraries. BUT…

After I upgraded from El Capitan to Mojave, I realized that most of the projects in my main iMovie Library was missing media. I tracked down the missing media and “re-imported the the original source media” as iMovie suggested. This was a tedious process, but in the end I was able to “fix” all but 2 (out of 80+) projects. So I was dismayed that the library was corrupt again after the latest iMovie update. Basically all of the original media that I had tracked down and re-imported had been lost — again. The newer projects were OK. So I moved them to a new Library. And “restored” the remaining projects by going back to a copy of the library that had painstakingly rebuilt 6 months ago. I've quit accessing this older library to avoid further corruption.

FWIW I think the original corruption may be due to how I created many of the projects. Until recently I took advantage of iMovie’s ability to access video directly from an iPhoto or Photos library. I now believe this was a very risky method, since I have many Photos libraries dating back to 2004. Over the years I may have changed their names, locations or rearranged their content. So the linkage between the projects/media in the iMovie and Photos libraries my have been lost/damaged. In any case, I now make sure that I import the video directly into the iMovie project.

GetRealBro