Thanks much for the suggestions. Yes, I’m sure if I can get the file converted into plain-text XML, I’ll be able to edit and salvage something out of the project. But I haven’t found a way to do that – every conversion utility I’ve tried fails.

I have tried your other suggestions, and unfortunately, no luck with those either. I appreciate the help, though!

My suggestions would be:
first backup the plist file then
- then try to delete the offending entry and/or (as I wrote this I realized you are unable to open it in order to delete a line, so this won’t work)
- look closely at the plain text entries and see if there is a file reference that doesn’t look right or make sense and/or
- if you are running Snow Leopard or Leopard, take a look at AppleJack to fix the disk overall
- or try fixing permissions in Disk Utility

Currently, I’m trying to solve a new problem, and I haven’t been able to find any useful suggestions, much less solutions, online.

iMovie crashed while the students were editing, and the computer had to be restarted. After re-opening iMovie, the project was no longer listed in the Project library, though the .rcproject file was still in the correct place. I opened the package to inspect the contents, and found that the “Project” file cannot be converted by plutil (or several other converters/plist editors that I tried). It generates an error of “Conversion of string failed. The string is empty.” I believe that iMovie was in the process of writing to this file when it crashed and thus the file became corrupted.

I’m trying find if there is any way to convert the corrupted “Project” file from binary to text – my hope is that some of the text would still be well-formed XML, and I could find the place(s) where the data is bad and delete/edit those, and in that way at least recover some of the students’ work (even if some is lost). But I haven’t been able to find any conversion program that will do it – all of the binary plist utilities I’ve found generate the same error listed above. (The file is not empty – it is 45KB, and if I open as plain text, it contains a lot of binary jumble but also a lot of readable text showing the titles, transitions, etc. from the project, so it seems there is still some good data in there.)

Any suggestions or help would be very much appreciated!

Somehow iMovie changed the filenames (added a 1 to the end) of some sourcefiles. Most likely instigated by me not knowing what I’m doing. Managed to fix the projects with this description, thank you!

I did some research and found out that a common cause of that error is when you have more than one clip in iMovie o9 with the same file name (for instance 041.avi and 041.mov). Another symptom besides the render error is audio problems where audio that’s supposed to be ducked (and from another part of the video) is still heard.

Anyways, the way to fix the problem, is to rename your media clips so that they all have unique names, which of course leads to a lot of missing clips. Instead of having to reimport the clips with their new file names and edit everything again, your tutorial allowed me to swap them out without that hassle.

Sorry for the long story, just wanted to document it in case others are searching for a solution. Thanks again for the excellent tutorial!