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Help with opening an iMovie library that crashes while validating

I had a iMovie library on my Time Machine backup that was on my 27" iMac (which was on High Sierra at the time.) The iMac's hard drive died, and we put in a new SSD. Long story short, it got copied off the Time Machine backup onto a new hard drive. Then I copied the library off my new hard drive onto the iMac, when iMovie tries to open the library, it says "validating" for a while and then crashes. I have tried a lot of things on other forums regarding corrupted project files, but I still can't seem to get it working. I had a lot of important projects on that library too - so not quite sure what to do next. :/


Any help would be appreciated!

iMac 27″

Posted on Sep 5, 2024 12:09 PM

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3 replies

Sep 6, 2024 9:26 AM in response to Rich839

Thank you for your reply!


The Time Machine backup is backing up another Mac now. I copied the iMovie library by just copying the "User" folder in the latest backup to an external hard drive (not sure if that was the best way, but anyhow.)

I found out what the problem is now though - (at first I didn't think it was) I Open Core Patched the mid 2011 iMac to run Sonoma. It ran great with minor issues - but I didn't think there would be an issue running iMovie until I found that if I did almost anything in iMovie it would crash. I found that since iMovie needed metal to run and since the iMac doesn't have this, that's where the issue lies. Probably the only way I can fix this is by getting High Sierra back on it and installing iMovie 10.1.12 - which is the latest version of iMovie to not need metal.

I found (after I had written the post) that my backup isn't corrupted as I tried putting some of my projects on my M1 Mac mini and it didn't crash or have issues - so I think it should work to load them on there.

Help with opening an iMovie library that crashes while validating

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