Stressful iMovie/Project Problem

Over the past few days, I have been working in iMovie on a load of video i took with my gopro camera from a skiing holiday. It was about a 4 min video with slow motion etc and lots of short clips. it has taken me bloody ages.. especially since iMovie likes to convert any video you want to edit properly into a massive file 4 times the original.. but that not the problem.

The problem occurred this afternoon when i opened iMovie and tried to carry on working on the project.. i couldn't seem to open the project originally but when it did open i can see all the segments of video in the top left, and all the source videos in the event browser, but it would not play through the project.. when it did decide to play (in full screen only) it played another project i was working on months ago and haven't touched since. I can however play all of the videos in the event browser and it even has the orange lines to show the bits included in my project. So it 'knows' which bits are included in the project so why can't it put two and two together?

One more thing, when i am in iMovie and i can see my projects in the top left, when i right click on any of the other projects i get a long list of options as normal.. but when i click on this ******* project it only gives me three options, (new project, new folder, and play full screen). Also i have not seen any errors from iMovie since this problem started.

I do understand how iMovie project files work and i have not touched the events folder or videos or the project files.

I hope someone can help me otherwise i may have wasted several hours of my life.

Thanks in advance

Specs etc:
Macbook pro late 2010, 2.4 GHz core 2
8GB ram
Mac 10.7.3 (Lion) <= Not worth the update
iMovie 11' 9.0.2
500gb HDD Less than 10gb remaining. (i blame iMovie's conversions)

Please don't tell me its a corrupt file.

Can't really help with the problem, but....

iMovie likes to convert any video you want to edit properly into a massive file 4 times the original..

Click to expand...

That's because the GoPro, in common with many other HD video cameras use the highly compressed h264 format. Compressed video is very difficult to edit, so iMovie converts to the Quicktime AIC format, which, as you've found, produces much larger files.

Verify your disk, verify your file permissions, get an external hard drive and move the extra stuff off your boot drive.

your 4 min video, taking up that much space on a 500gb drive? I cant see how. I am editing the 3rd episode of a webseries shot in 1080i, multiple takes per scene with up to 3 cameras and 4 microphones. Each episode is over 9 minutes long in the finished version. All the content in FCP still doesnt even come up to 1/3 my 500 GB drive. Oh, and almost 2 hours of video from a concert as well.

Clean up your HD, get some space. That is probably your biggest issue - there is no room for a scratch file.

Problem solved, i began to re-do the whole project and as i added bits from each source clip, they then worked in the original project. iMovie must have re-established some form of connection.. with the files. Also the massive hard disk space taken is due to the 6 or 7 hours of source footage i have in 960p not the 4 min project itself. About 80gb.