Craig Koster

iMovie ‘08 Archiving

I’ve accumulated quite a bit of home video on my hard drive and wanted to see how I could archive all my clips onto an external USB drive. After some Googling and experimentation I found the following to work nicely:

1) Right click in the ‘Events’ panel at the lower left of the iMovie screen and make sure ‘View Events By Volume’ is checked. This will list all volumes available for archiving/reading events.

2) Just drag the events you want to archive to your backup volume (USB drive, Time Capsule, etc.) and iMovie will move them for you nicely.

One disadvantage of this is that anytime you want to work with or play projects that depend on the events you moved, you’ll need to make sure your backup volume is accessible. You’ll see a little yellow caution sign on any project that uses event clips that are not available.

I was tempted to move all my files via the Finder but I’d recommend staying away from this method as iMovie is not aware that you’re moving the files.

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009