Information and Technology

Moving Your iMovie 11 Project files to another Mac

If you are creating a video project with iMovie 11 on a Bowdoin lab computer, e.g., Coles 2 South,, you will either need to work on the same computer each time or move your project to an external harddrive after each session.  The instructions below explain why and how to do that. 

When you create a new movie project, iMovie creates 2 folders on your computer's harddrive: 

• iMovie Events
• iMovie Projects

All of the information about your movie and all the video, image, or audio files you import into your project will be stored in one of those 2 folders.  iMovie automaticallly stores those folders on your computer's internal harddrive.

How to move your iMovie Project to an external hard drive or another computer:

1. Attach your external hard drive to the computer. The hard drive will be listed as another drive in your Event Library.

2. If your hard drive has a yellow exclamation point, it is formatted for Windows and you will need to reformat it before you start. (See directions for reformatting your external drive for Mac)

3. Go to your Project Library. Drag your Project to your external hard drive.

4. Choose Copy Project and Events. (This will copy the video that belongs with your project) You can now work straight from your external hard drive or copy it to another computer to work on.

Reformatting your external drive for Mac. (Warning – this erases all the files on the external hard drive!)

1. Go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.

2. Select your external hard drive.

3. Select the Erase Tab.

4. Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). 

5. Click Erase. 

6. Click Erase again.The drive will be erased and reformatted.

7. Click Do not Add  to the Time Machine back up.

8. Go back to iMovie and your external hard drive will be listed as an available drive to copy your project to.