iMovie: refreshing video source files

November 21, 2006 11:32 AM

iMovie: how can I refresh video source files?

I recently completed a large iMovie project after incorrectly preparing the source files. I now know how to properly prepare the source video and would love to just replace all of it, intact, in iMovie (preserving all my nice transitions, titles and cropping). The files have the same names, duration, etc. Is this possible, or am I going to have to do it all over again?

Thanks for your time-
cgs


More info, not really pertinent:
- my source files are Mumex MPG, which doesn't work in iMovie.
- I found a tool (MPEG Streamclip) and converted them to DV
- when I brought them into iMovie, they were scaled wrong, so I bought the iMovie cfx scaling plugin and stretched them back into the correct shape
- at this point, everything still looked decent in iMovie, even during test mode.
- however, when I output to MOV or to a DVD (via iDVD, it looks like crap, due to blending of the scaled interlace fields, which i now know about).
- I have done a new test on a sample file, de-interlacing before iMovie, and it looks much better

posted by cgs to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

iMovie takes copies of all the video you give it and puts it inside the iMovie project file. (You can open these up by ctrl-clicking them and choosing "show package contents".)

You could, theoretically, replace these files with ones of identical lengths, however, any footage with titles, transitions, or modifications such as cropping will have been re-rendered to a new, separate file. If you used a scaling plug-in, this has probably re-rendered everything.

There is no way to tell iMovie to re-render things without deleting the effect or modification and doing it again.

So basically, the answer is "No, you can't do this".

Sorry.
posted by Mwongozi at 12:16 PM on November 21, 2006

Response by poster: heh... give it to me straight, doc
;-)
posted by cgs at 12:41 PM on November 21, 2006