iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Converting Older Projects

In the iMovie 6 era, your movie may appear on the hard drive in one of two formats.

Figure 4-15. Top: When you open an older iMovie project, this message appears.Bottom: Sometimes, opening an older project produces this message, which refers to clips that are still in the Trash. For details, see Section 5.3.

• If the movie began life in iMovie 5 (“iMovie HD”) or iMovie 6, it’s represented on your hard drive by a single file icon (see Figure 4-14, top). Having a single-icon project document makes it very convenient to open, copy, delete, rename, or move a video project, because you have only one icon to worry about.

• If it’s an iMovie 1, 2, 3, or 4 project that you’ve opened into iMovie 6, it remains just as it was: as a folder full of associated files (Figure 4-14, bottom).

When you open a pre-HD project, iMovie asks permission to update its file format into the iMovie HD format, as shown in Figure 4-15. If you want to edit the project in iMovie 6, you have no choice; you must click OK. Doing so creates a new project file, and preserves a copy of the original with the filename suffix " .iMovie2Project” (see Figure 4-14, bottom).

Now, even if you click OK, your old iMovie project folder doesn’t get turned into the new-style, single-icon project file as described earlier. Instead, iMovie leaves you with the original project folder, with a few new files and ...