Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Let's take a look at managing your iMovie project and Clips.
We're using iMovie 10 here and we're going to take a look at how iMovie stores files.
It's different than the previous versions of iMovie but it still uses the idea of events
and projects.
You've got an iMovie Library.
This one is called iMovie Library which is the name it was given when it was created
but you can call it anything you want.
Under it I have two events; Samples and Samples 2.
The events themselves have projects.
Two movie projects in this one and one movie project in this one.
You can create new events very easily by going to File/New Event and you can also create
new movie projects and also trailer projects here.
They go inside of one of the events which all then go inside of a Library.
Now to see where this iMovie Library is stored is pretty straight forward.
I'm going to Control click on it.
Actually you can see as I rolled over there the apps come up.
I'm going to use Reveal in Finder.
I can see that in my Movies folder, which is in my User folder, I've got a file here
called iMovie Library.imovielibrary.
Inside of this is where all those different clips and the projects themselves are stored.
You can see my old iMovie Events and iMovie Projects folder from previous versions of
iMovie but this is where the iMovie 10 stores them.
So, I've got this here.
I've also got another iMovie Library right there that I am not even accessing right now.
You can create new iMovie Libraries very easily.
To do that go to Open Library here and you can see it even knows that there is another
one there.
I create a new one and I'll call it Test Library and I'm going to save it.
Notice I can save it anywhere I want.
So I'm going to save it here to the same folder here, the movies folder, as it was saved before.
But I could actually save it somewhere else, like say another drive.
So if I had multiple drives connected to my Mac I could easily save it there.
Now I can see I have iMovie Library and Test Library here and I could have used this same
Open Library and opened the iMovie Library 1.
I can select Other and then go to another drive somewhere and find other iMovie libraries.
You can see it puts a Default event in here which is empty.
There is no media, there is no project in it.
You can also see I can drag and drop an entire event from one to the other.
So I'm going to move Sample 2 to the Test Library.
You can see that it does that.
If the Test Library was in a different drive I would have just copied this entire event
and projects to that other drive.
I can now delete it from here if I want.
So I have the ability to move entire projects and events around as I need.
Which brings us to a very straight forward way to archive your projects.
All you need to do is create an Archive Library, stick it on another drive, do it the way we
just did inside of iMovie, and then drag these projects here.
You can see I can actually hold the Command key down.
When I hold the Command key down what is going to happen is it is actually going to move,
not copy, but move that whole set of projects and events here, all the clips, everything
in Samples, to this one.
So I just moved it possibly to another drive and then if I wanted to I could then close
this and now that is gone.
It is still there.
Its in that file and I just don't have it listed here on the left.
So it is a very easy way to access it.
When it is in Archive I could open it again right now, drag another event in there, and
then close it again.
Very easy then to move projects around between drives, to hide projects that are still there
and archive them.
iMovie makes it pretty simple to do that as long as you do it all within this.
Then you also have the ability here at the Libraries if I don't want to have to mess
with all of these figuring out where things are.
I can look at all my projects and all my clips here by using these shortcuts which just basically
lists everything available below it.
I can also close these up so if I have a whole bunch I can shrink this down and focus on
what I really want to do right now.
Just to show you what is going on here if I take a look at this library in the Finder,
just like the iPhoto Library, it is a package.
I can Control click on it and Show Package Contents and under there I can see stuff like
here is a library here, some data files, inside Samples I've got different media rendering
files.
All sorts of things like that.
The iMovie event.
So all of this stuff is just stored in here and is now hidden from you because iMovie
is controlling it and if you go in there and you start messing around with the files iMovie
is going to get really confused because it is not going to find the things that it needs
to find for this event.