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Moving iMovie ’11 Events and Projects to a Custom Location

I’m about to embark on a group video project in my New Media class. To that end, it’s a hassle when the video (and script!) exist only in the account of one of the group members. I saw one suggestion for how to store the iMovie events and projects on an external drive, which seemed deeply convoluted and, well… a hassle. I’m not interested in purchasing or setting up external drives, or in going through that rigamarole to set it up.

So, it occurred to me that /Users/Shared/ is a pretty fine place to store shared files. And that the modern Mac OS X seems to honor symlinks pretty regularly (something I use all the time to sync my life across machines using dropbox — symlinking whole directories to sync preferences, settings and documents that the developers haven’t — yet — moved to the cloud.)

It seems to work for iMovie as well. Here’s how I did it (stay tuned to see if it blows up on my students!):

1. Trash the iMovie Events folder in the user’s Movies folder. (This assumes that this is, essentially, a clean install of iMovie — no previous events or projects to worry about. That’s my situation).
2. Create a new iMovie Events folder in /Users/Shared/ (note that it is created there, not moved or copied there, so that it will inherit permissions from the Shared directory).
3. Set the permissions on iMovie Events to let everyone read and write. I like the terminal for this:
   

   chmod -R a+rw /Users/Shared/iMovie\ Events

   chmod -R a+rw /Users/Shared/iMovie\ Events

4. In the terminal, create the symlink:
   

   ln -s /Users/Shared/iMovie\ Events ~/Movies/iMovie\ Events

   ln -s /Users/Shared/iMovie\ Events ~/Movies/iMovie\ Events

   (Note that the space in “iMovie Events” needs to be escaped with a backslash!)

5. In iMovie, create new projects on the hard drive (probably called Macintosh HD), rather than the user’s home folder. This will put the projects in /User/Shared/ (I didn’t know that until this experiment — cool!)

In my limited testing, this seems to work transparently. The biggest caveat is the permissions change. When creating events, iMovie seems to strip the write permissions off of the inherited permissions for the iMovie Events folder (but other users can still read and execute, which should be fine). Similarly, it’s possible that other users can only read (but not edit) the shared project.

We shall see.

Seth Battis October 31st, 2012

Posted In: How To

Tags: iMovie, iMovie '11, Mac OS X, sharing