I was in the middle of editing an iMovie project, the program shut down suddenly and when I reopened, all the tabs were red and couldn’t do a playback. My Media files seem to be in tact. But everything on the timeline bars are red. After many hours of tedious editing, I hope this can be restored. Help please. 😞🙏🏼
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.6
Hi,
The first thing to do is to try deleting/resetting preferences. To delete/reset preferences, open iMovie while holding down the Option and Command keys and select to delete preferences in the box that appears. iMovie will open in a new empty library. Reopen your old library to get back to your projects. (To reopen your old library close iMovie and go to your Movie folder or wherever you have your old iMovie library stored. Double click on the library’s icon. iMovie will open in that library.) Possibly you may need to reboot to set the changes. Deleting
preferences is a safe procedure that will not cause data loss or disruption to your project.
If deleting preferences doesn't work, try going to the iMovie backups folder and opening a previous automatically saved backup of your library, that occurred immediately before the crash occured.
To get to the iMovie Backups folder, follow this file path from the Finder menu:
Go/Home/Library/Containers/com.apple.iMovieApp/Data/Library/Caches/iMovieBackups
NOTE: If running Ventura or later, in the above file path substitute iMovie for com.apple.iMovieApp. So, for Ventura, the file path would read:
Go/Home/Library/Containers/iMovie/Data/Library/Caches/iMovieBackups
When you get there you will see a list of previous backups of your iMovie library. Click on one dated just before your issue started. iMovie will open in that backup library and will not overwrite your original library. In the backup library navigate to your projects browser (where your projects are displayed as icons) and see if your projects are intact and play properly.
-- Rich
Hi,
The first thing to do is to try deleting/resetting preferences. To delete/reset preferences, open iMovie while holding down the Option and Command keys and select to delete preferences in the box that appears. iMovie will open in a new empty library. Reopen your old library to get back to your projects. (To reopen your old library close iMovie and go to your Movie folder or wherever you have your old iMovie library stored. Double click on the library’s icon. iMovie will open in that library.) Possibly you may need to reboot to set the changes. Deleting
preferences is a safe procedure that will not cause data loss or disruption to your project.
If deleting preferences doesn't work, try going to the iMovie backups folder and opening a previous automatically saved backup of your library, that occurred immediately before the crash occured.
To get to the iMovie Backups folder, follow this file path from the Finder menu:
Go/Home/Library/Containers/com.apple.iMovieApp/Data/Library/Caches/iMovieBackups
NOTE: If running Ventura or later, in the above file path substitute iMovie for com.apple.iMovieApp. So, for Ventura, the file path would read:
Go/Home/Library/Containers/iMovie/Data/Library/Caches/iMovieBackups
When you get there you will see a list of previous backups of your iMovie library. Click on one dated just before your issue started. iMovie will open in that backup library and will not overwrite your original library. In the backup library navigate to your projects browser (where your projects are displayed as icons) and see if your projects are intact and play properly.
-- Rich
Thank you Rich. What I actually did was I re-imported all the media files I used for my project. And gor my project back running. 90% of the red tabs turned green. Which was a big relief, I did not have to start from scratch. Thanks for all the advise. :D
RED tabs on iMovie
