iMovie 09 doesn't accept the iMovie 08 sparsebundle trick!

[sphardy]

Sorry - still don't have iMove '09 so cannot test and probably won't purchase as I have most recently been using Final Cut rather than iMovie.

Assuming this works properly on local clips you need to figure how iMovie stores the 'Favorite' information. You have one clue if it does work locally as a starting point - if the data seems to not be being saved and the only difference is the location of the video clips it would appear feasible that iMovie puts this data somewhere in the iMovie event folder and so is trying to write to the NAS.

Could it be a permissions issue? Can iMovie write into the NAS folder containing your clips?

///P

[majayjay]

Hi Sphardy,

Well, I've identified a couple things:
1) Marking favorites and rejecting clips works on clips that are on my local drive. Still not working on clips on the NAS.
2) I don't believe that iMovie is able to write to the NAS. I am unable to split an event into multiple events, and...
3) If if I adjust the date and time in clips, it appears to take in my current session of iMovie. After doing this, I checked in the local Movies folder and sub-folders on my hard drive to see if it wrote any information to the local drive and confirmed that it did not. When I exit out of iMovie and then re-open iMovie again, all changes revert back to what they were before I changed it.

How do I go about changing/correcting permissions to allow iMovie to write to the NAS?
-My clips are on the NAS at: \\Videos\iMovie Events
-I am using the Share Security Mode.
-The "Videos" Share has only AFP access enabled and has default read/write access. There is a share password assigned to the Videos Share. I always mount the "Videos" share before starting iMovie. (I've also tried disabling the password for the Videos share and that did not help either.)

Do I go to Frontview\Shares\Share Listing\Advanced Options and then check the "Set ownership and permission for existing files and folders in this share to the above setting. This option is usefell in cases wher you are changing security levels and need to work around file access problems."?

I started to do this, but it gave me a message that it will change the timestamp, which I didn't understand and was afraid that would mess with the dates on my video clips. I looked in the NAS user guide and it said that performing this step is not easily reversible, so it kind of scared me out of doing it. If I am to try this, I'm not clear what the share folder owner and the share folder groups should be set to. Currently they are:
Share folder owner: Videos
Share folder group: nogroup

Do I need to change anything regarding persmissions on my MacBook Pro?

Please help!!!

FYI-
I really like the new iPhoto 09, that might be a reason in and of itself to upgrade to iLife09. Faces isn't perfect, but works pretty well and is a cool feature. I really love Places! I am going through all of my pictures and geo tagging them. It's a pain to do my existing library, but I love being able to see exactly where I was. I've been pinpointing hotels I stayed at, etc. It should be pretty easy to maintain moving forward, even without a GPS enabled phone.

[majayjay]

Ugh!!

I was doing some more experimenting...

I went into Finder, selected the iMovie Events folder on my NAS and then hit the Get Info button.
In the Sharing and Permissions section of the window, I tried assigning read/write permission to the "everyone" group. It was originally read only. After selecting Read/Write, it went to NO ACCESS. Now I cannot access the folder and cannot revert the permission or change the permission.

Can I correct this? Am I screwed?

Sorry to be such a bone head!!!

[sphardy]

Do I go to Frontview\Shares\Share Listing\Advanced Options and then check the "Set ownership and permission for existing files and folders in this share to the above setting. This option is usefell in cases wher you are changing security levels and need to work around file access problems."?

It would certainly appear that file permissions have been screwed up. Unfortuantely I am not familiar with Share security mode as I have never used it, but the option to 'Set Ownership and permission...' is a good starting point.

But before you do - verify you can create new files in that share. If you can create files with another program, then iMovie shoudl be able to also. That then suggests it may be problems with the permissions on exisiting files and so you can use the 'Set Ownership...' option

I started to do this, but it gave me a message that it will change the timestamp, which I didn't understand and was afraid that would mess with the dates on my video clips.

The important date/time info is held within the video clip - the dates used by iMovie are the actual dates the video is shot - the timestamp referred to is the time of the actual file itself which will probably be the date you copied the files to the NAS - probably not important to you so you can let the update happen

Do I need to change anything regarding persmissions on my MacBook Pro?

Absolutely not - all permissions we are discussing here are NAS permissions and as such need to be modified on the NAS.

As to your latter problem - I think the 'Set Ownership...' function should fix that too

///P

[majayjay]

I tried saving a Word Doc from Word to the Videos share and that worked fine. Is this an adequate test?

I performed the "Set Ownership..." function on the NAS and that took care of the access problem that I had created with Finder.

All iMovie issues remain. Any other suggestions?

[sphardy]

One last test would be to try to delete or rename one of the problematic files - that then verifies this is unlikely an issue with the original data as you can modify that data - your test with Word proves you can create new files.

Otherwise, I think we need someone else with iMovie '09 to try the same and verify if they see the same problems as your setup seems to be correct

///P

[majayjay]

I am able to delete a clip from within iMovie and have it also delete the clip from the NAS.

One more clue...
Within Finder, If I copy a video clip on the NAS to anywhere else on the NAS, I am not able to view the copied video clip using Preview or QuickTime. Preview and QuickTime will play the original file. The copied file seams to copy fine and it is the same file size as the original. The copied file however, no longer has an icon that contains a thumbnail from the video, but rather just shows a QuickTime logo. When I try to open it in QuickTime, I get the message "The movie could not be opened. The Resource Map is Incorrect."

[majayjay]

So I copied all of my iMovie events from the NAS onto my local hard drive. I then opened iMovie, accessing the clips on my local hard drive and modified all the dates and times of the clips. I then closed, then re-opened iMovie and verified that the changes were still reflected, which they were.

Then I copied all the events back to the NAS and re-created simlinks to them. I then opened iMovie accessing the NAS iMovie clips, and none of the changes were reflected.

I went back to the clips on my local hard drive (which I kept) and looked at the file names in Finder. The file names reflect the original clip dates and times, not the revised dates and times that I had changed them to in iMovie. I opened iMovie again, accessing the clips on my local hard drive and the dates and times in iMovie reflected the changes that I had made previously.

Does anyone know where iMovie stores the information for clip dates and times? I had assumed it was the clip's filename, but that doesn't seem to be the case based on my experimenting.

I still cannot make any changes to clips residing on the NAS. Can't mark favorites, can't mark video to reject, can't change dates or times of clips.

Is there anyone who is also experimenting with iMovie 09 and the ReadyNAS? I would appreciate any feedback on successes or problems.

FYI-I am having to change dates and times of clips due to having traveled to different time zones, across the international date line and did not adjust the video camera's clock accordingly upon arriving.

[davegadgeteer]

I've been waiting for you guys to solve the iMovie 09 problem for me... Thanks for all your efforts!

Meanwhile, I just consider the ReadyNASpro to be a backup duplicate copy of my local 1.5TB hard drive, but completely unusable on the ReadyNASpro. Very disappointing!

Copying my 1TB of video clips to the ReadyNASpro took ages, several days on a 1Gb/s Ethernet setup, but was made much worse because one of the Ethernet hops was through the switch in my main Apple Airport Basestation, and perhaps due to noisy phone lines in the rains lately, I had to power cycle the DSL modem and Basestation router about once a day in order to restore Internet access. (I've now moved my ReadyNASpro next to my Mac Pro, so traffic only goes through one Gb switch nearby and doesn't get powercycled. I think the reduction in switch hops helped noticeably too, but didn't make any real measurements.)

In order to check that all my files made it successfully given those interruptions (they did not), I wrote scripts to calculate MD5 hashes of each file both locally and on the ReadyNASpro, and compared the hashes, recopying those that didn't match (mostly due to incomplete copying). A lot of the cache files didn't match, but I assumed those were changed by using iMovie and didn't matter, so I didn't recopy them.

I wonder if anyone writes a folder sync program that will actually compare file contents to verify a copy?

Anyway, I'm kind of securely backed up now (as long as this house doesn't burn down or flood or whatever), but the backup isn't useable.

I hope someone figures out how to make ReadyNASpro really work with iMovie 09. Why doesn't it just act like a mounted network disk, for pity's sake??

[bollar]

The best solution right now for a Pro Business (and hopefully Pioneer soon) is to create an iSCSI drive on the NAS and load the clips onto it. I have found that to be a reliable and fast solution and I don't think I would go back to the sparsebundle trick, even if someone figures it out.

[sphardy]

The best solution right now for a Pro Business (and hopefully Pioneer soon) is to create an iSCSI drive on the NAS and load the clips onto it. I have found that to be a reliable and fast solution and I don't think I would go back to the sparsebundle trick, even if someone figures it out.

Unfortunately, the Pro is 2x the price of a new NV+ where I live - Too pricey for for the moment

So... I took the plunge today and have ordered my iLife upgrade, primarily based on the good reports re. improvements to iMovie. I'll post what I find for us poor NV+/Duo users

[majayjay]

Sweet! Please let us know if you figure it out. For the time being, I have relegated myself to just using an external hard drive to hold video and then using the ReadNAS NV+ only to hold a backup of my video. I think the incompatibility with iMovie 09 and having the iMovie Events on the Ready NAS NV+ has to do with the fact that the readynas is not formated as OS X extended (journaled).

Sphardy, I think you'll like iPhoto 09 also, unless you are using something else already.

[davegadgeteer]

I've given up on my ReadyNAS Pro for now, am going to try a Drobo attached via Firewire 800.

[sphardy]

OK - Finally got my copy of iMovie '09 up and running and have experimented a little with hosting video clips on my NV+

News is all bad I'm afraid as it would appear that iMovie is unable or unwilling to write to the NAS. Video clips can of course be access by setting up a Symbolic Link as discussed previously but any attempt to make changes that would require writing to the Movie Clip directories seem to fail.

The problem occurs whether accessing the NAS via AFP or CIFS (A step back as CIFS access was supported in iMovie '08). I have even tried to use the Time Machine share in the 4.1.5 beta to see if the tricks Netgear used there to get TM to work would allow iMovie to work, but to no avail.

Meta data such as which portions of video are to be marked as favorite or rejected appear to be written to a file called 'iMovie Data' that is created within each Movie Event folder. I can only get that file to be created when running with a local Movie event. Even copying an event where that file already exists such that it may be modified while hosted on the NAS also fails.

Bottom line - given the reduced functionality vs even iMovie '08 - it's hard not to wonder if this is intentional on the part of Apple. Afraid the only resort appears to be hosting the Video Clips locally while being worked on and just using the NAS for archiving. Not ideal, but not a huge hardship I guess

[topo_nas]

Has anyone tried getting iMovie to use Network Volumes using the trick described in this article?

http://carryflag.blogspot.com/2010/06/imovie-event-library-on-network-drive.html

I wonder if iPhoto has a similar hidden setting.