iMovie HD: Getting Your Clips BACK in Order

What's up with this madness where the clips in your clips pane get all jumbled and totally out of order? Then, after carefully rearranging your clips one-by-one in the clips pane, you go to drag a series of two or more clips to the timeline only to have them reshuffle and end up back OUT of order. INSANITY!

So, if you've got your clips with all their default names (e.g. Clip 01.dv, Clip 02.dv, etc.)...

here's the easy (though not so quick) fix if you have not yet started editing:

FIRST - make sure you have enough disk space to essentially duplicate all your clip files

THEN follow these steps...

1) create a new folder in the Finder
2) go to your iMovie project's icon in the Finder and Control-click
3) choose "Show Package Contents"
4) open the "Media" folder
5) Command-a to select all the clips/files
6) drag these clips to your newly created folder (step #1)
7) reopen your iMovie project (or start a new one) - if you opened your old project, there should no longer be any clips
8) in iMovie, go to File/Import and import all the files from your newly created folder
9) wait for the whole process to happen - this can take a long time, so be patient
10) now your iMovie project should have all the clips reordered according to filename - drag/drop should work without reshuffling

keywords: imovie clips order reorder