iMovie 09 Project Lost

We went on a family trip to Las Vegas recently and shot some video and pics that I edited together into a nice piece to remember the trip. It even had a funny ending where it showed different people and made-up stories about their escapades in Sin City (yeah, I know whatever happens in Vegas, etc.).

After I had posted the video to YouTube, I wanted to export the project to iTunes so we could see it on our AppleTV. The project no longer showed up in iMovie. It was there in Finder, but even double clicking on it directly didn't help.

I wasn't able to recover the project, but since I had uploaded it to YouTube, the exported 720p file still existed. It wasn't a complete loss, and I reminded myself to back up more often.

To get to the exported file, I selected the project, right-clicked and picked 'Show Package Contents' (iMovie projects are actually special folders called 'packages'). Inside there's a folder called Movies which has the exported version(s).

FWIW, I checked out the project file itself, and it was full of the same character. The file appears to be a binary format, but normally there's something recognizable like a clip name. In this case it looks like iMovie decided to nuke the data. Too bad.

So, in addition to backing up I'm going through each of my projects and exporting the highest resolution possible to the Media Browser. That makes the files visible to other iLife programs and still gives me the option to export a separate file later.