It would be a bummer if this were “fixed” in the latest version!

Yes, this is on the most current versions of Snow Leopard and iMovie 09. I posted my issue to the Apple Forums today, but so far there are no responses.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2207546&tstart=15

I can sum up my problem this way:

* Projects point to a portable drive for their source footage
* Projects have been rendered and published
* Source footage deleted from portable drive
* If the project was manually fixed to update source clip locations, gray thumbnails appear throughout the project
* If the project was not manually fixed, project thumbnails look fine
* Both situations produce yellow triangles, which are expected

Thanks for thinking about this,
Dave

I have tested this process with the new version…

Let’s start there.
Thanks,
Lief

I too had the yellow triangles after moving my source footage. Following the great tutorial worked perfectly… until…

Let me explain what I’m doing. Whenever I do my editing, I use a portable drive with all my source clips. I’ll work on a project, always pointing to the portable drive, and eventually publish it. Then, to free up space on the portable drive, but still keep copies of my source footage, I move the source clips to a Drobo. This of course produces the yellow triangles in my project files, but they can easily be removed by moving the source clips from the Drobo back to the portable drive. When iMovie opens, everything is back to normal. This works perfectly well when you keep the exact same folder/file names as when you created the project. However, in a few cases, I didn’t do this, which is what brought me to this site and this tutorial.

In these cases, I copied the source clips used in the project back to the portable drive, used the technique described in the tutorial, and as promised, all the yellow triangles disappeared. Then, I deleted the source files from the portable drive, and next time I opened iMovie, in addition to the expected yellow triangles, the thumbnails in the project were all gray. When you scrub over them, you see the video, but as soon as you move the cursor off, they go back to gray. So, it seems that simply changing the project file to point to a different file location isn’t all that needs to be updated, at least in the case of a project that has already been published.

Here’s why this is weird: in another project that I had published, but didn’t use the tutorial to change the project file, I also deleted the source clips from the portable drive (to which the project points), and the project thumbnails are fine, though the yellow triangles reappear, as expected.

In looking around the Apple forums, people suggested closing iMovie, moving the source footage back onto the portable drive, deleting the thumbnail and the Cache.plist files, re-opening iMovie and letting it rebuild the thumbnails. I did this, but with the same result: gray previews.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening, or how to prevent/fix it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave