"The Specified File Fork Does Not Exist"

This is sort of a two part question. I debated putting this in the "Movie and Video" forum since I think this above a "newb" level question, and it deals with said media, but I'll try my luck here.

I recently cropped a video in iMovie. iMovie was not my first choice to do this editting but I can not seem to find a free video cutter for Mac anywhere. If anyone knows of a free video cutter for Mac that they could link me to then the rest of this post can be ignored, but if not...

After cropping the video in iMovie, I saved it, and tried opening it Quicktime. I get the error message; "the specified file fork does not exist." VLC doesn't even attempt to try to open it. I'm not sure if this is an error with the actual file or not. It seems silly that a Mac program such as Quicktime would be unable to open a file created in another Mac program (iMovie).

Any help is appreciated.

The file is corrupted.

Try re-saving. You didn't tell us what format you used to save it the first time, but perhaps a different format will also help.

Thanks for the reply, chas_m. The original file was a .mov. iMovie forces the .imovieproject extension on the end of everything so it bacame .mov.imovieproject.

I tried saving it again and I'm still getting the error when trying to open it.

EDIT: I solved my own problem. I had to export the video as a Quicktime file instead of saving it as an iMovie project.

Yes, as soon as I saw your second post I knew exactly what the problem was, but you'd already found the solution.

iMovie saves its own files as imovieproject because it's really an XML file that POINTS to the assets and the way they've been edited rather than itself being a movie. Great for space-saving but, as you discovered, unplayable in and of itself.