iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

How iMovie Organizes Its Files

Thousands of people will come to iMovie 6 for the first time, observing that each movie is saved as a single document icon. They’ll go on through life, believing that an iMovie project is a simple, one-icon file, just like a JPEG photo or a Microsoft Word document.

In fact, though, it’s not.

What iMovie creates is not really a document icon. It’s a package icon, which, to Mac OS X aficionados, is code for “a thinly disguised folder.” Yes, it opens up like a document when double-clicked. But if you know what you’re doing, you can open it like a folder instead, and survey the pieces that make up an iMovie movie.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can hopelessly mangle your movie. Still, now and then, checking out package contents can get you out of a troubleshooting jam.

To reveal the contents of this folder-pretending-to-be-a-document, use the Controlkey trick revealed in Figure 4-16.

Figure 4-16. Left: Every new iMovie project “file” is actually a folder. To open it, Controlclick it (or right-click it, if you have a second mouse button). From the shortcut menu, choose Show Package Contents.Right: Inside, the contents look very similar to the contents of an old iMovie project folder, shown in Figure 4-14.

Once you’ve opened up a package into a folder, it looks and works almost exactly like the project folder of older iMovie versions, illustrated ...