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Monday, February 18, 2013

How to find iMovie Finalized Movie Files


Finalizing iMovie Files

IMovie is a great program for its cost. Typical Apple software, you have to prod and probe to find out how it works and you do not have to worry how it stores files on your disk. Well I do worry.

I was testing out the movie capabilities of my new indulgence, a Nikon D7000, by filming my two grand daughters. All went well, uploaded video to YouTube for rest of the family to see my master piece and then decided to Finalize project, an option in the File menu. This builds movies of various sizes so that if in the future if you use Share you will not have to wait for the movie project to be rendered.

I thought these pre-built movies could also be useful for just showing on my iMac without having to start iMovie, but where were they.

Locating the files.

The answer can be found in Apple Support pages, here is the contribution by John Cogdell Adelaide, Australia.


So following these instructions i went to Finder and found my iMovie projects.



Right-clicked on project and chose 
Show Package Contents

Still not sure what this "Package" is all about but I think of it as a sort of hidden Zip file.

And hey-presto here are my various size versions of the movie. If I click on any of these they run independent of iMovie using your default player. Alternatively right click on movie and use Open With QuickTime.


I made an alias for the 1028HD version, and moved the alias onto my desktop, renamed it with a meaningful name and now I just click this and the movie starts.