moving VERY old iMovie projects into iMovie 10

Hi,

You would need the iMovie app that created the projects to open them as a project. However, you might be able to extract a movie of the project. The procedure below works with iMovie 5 and iMovie 6, but not sure it will work

with your earlier iMovie versions. But it is worth a try. Try this procedure to see if you can extract the project movie from the iMovie version project that you have.

Click on the "Shared Movies" folder that you obtained. If there is an" iDVD" subfolder within "Shared Movies", click on iDVD. Inside the iDVD folder you should see a .mov video file. That is the video of the project. Copy, not move. the .mov file to your desktop. It won't open with QuickTimePlayer in its present format. So,select and control-click on the .mov file icon and, in the drop down menu that appears, click on "Encode Selected Video Files". Fill in your settings options in the box that appears. Then click Continue to start the re-encoding. Nothing will appear to be happening as the encoding progresses. Wait for a few minutes. Eventually a temporary file will appear on your desktop indicating that the encoding is continuing. Leave the temporary file alone -- it won't play a movie. Wait as long as necessary for the encoding to complete. When finished the temporary file will disappear and an .m4v movie file will appear on your desktop. Open it with QuickTimePlayer. You can import the re-encoded movie into an iMovie 10 project.

You can also use the free download, Handbrake, to convert the file to an Mp4 file.

-- Rich

Just playing with this, I found that the old free download, MPEG Streamclip was able to convert to Mp4 the .mov clip retrieved from Shared Movies/iDVD. Neither Quicktime Player 10, nor Handbrake, nor VLC could do it. MPEG Streamclip won't work on operating systems from Catalina forward. So you would need to have the app on an older computer.

Good luck with this.

-- Rich

Your first preference was naturally to bring the project into iMovie 10.4. .

If you are not able to achieve this then you may be able to bring the original media in from the Media folders that you have referred to in your original post. Would mean starting all over again though.

The format of the original media may be too old to work in iMovie 10.4 but worth a try.

If still no luck, use the free download, Handbrake, to convert the movie to Mp4.

You can get Handbrake here:

https://handbrake.fr/

A simple way to do it is to open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source.

Navigate to your video and choose it as the source from the resulting screen.

Then do File/Start Encoding. Wait a few minutes for the conversion to

complete. Then save and import the converted clip into iMovie 10.

-- Rich

I didn't ask, but did you try, without converting, to import into iMovie 10 whatever format of the video file that you retrieved from the Shared Movies/iDVD folder?

Likely the video is the old .dv format.

-- Rich

Here's what I see: for a .mov file from an iMovie 6 project:

When I click Continue it converts the file to an M4a file. However, like in your case, Handbrake says no valid source. The VLC app also says codec not supported.

Try this: Instead of dragging out a copy of the movie from the Shared Movies/iDVD file, try instead to convert it within the iDVD folder, using the Control-click/Encode.Selected Video Files Then drag out the converted file.

Can you post a copy of the icon of the video file that you are trying to convert? Is it a .mov file? Possibly the procedure won't work for iMovie versions older that iMovie 5.

-- Rich

Have you tried to open the projects with the version of iMovie that you have on your G4?

If you can then you should be able to do an export from that and bring it into your iMovie 10.4

Try simply accepting the default setting that appears in the Encode Box that pops up when you control click on the movie file icon.

-- Rich