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I created a new iMovie project yesterday and imported a number of MOV and HEIC files. I made some minor adjustments (trimming clips and cropping pictures) and all was working well. When I opened the project again today, many - but not all - of my media clips were a black box that said "Missing plugin". If I played the movie, those media clips were just black. Anyone know what would cause this?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.6
I figured out what was wrong. When I went to look at the files iMovie was using (iMovie Library -> Show Package Contents -> ProjectName -> Original Media), I noticed that all the files under the Original Media folder were simply Alias files that pointed to the location on my hard drive where I have the originals saved. The problem was that I have that folder marked to be backed up by iCloud so MacOS had uploaded all my media files from that folder to iCloud (they had the little cloud with a down arrow symbol next to them) and therefore they were no longer downloaded on my hard drive.
This meant that iMovie was using an Alias file to point to the files on my hard drive. But my hard drive didn't actually contain those files on disk - it just contained the pointers to the iCloud versions and thus iMovie couldn't function properly. The few media files that hadn't yet to be uploaded to iCloud were the ones still appearing normally in iMovie.
So to work around this, I clicked on the folder of my hard drive were I keep those files and hit Download Now to download them back down from iCloud. Once this finished and I restarted iMovie, everything was working again.
Not sure why iMovie decided to use Alias files instead of making a copy of the files for itself, but things are working again.
I figured out what was wrong. When I went to look at the files iMovie was using (iMovie Library -> Show Package Contents -> ProjectName -> Original Media), I noticed that all the files under the Original Media folder were simply Alias files that pointed to the location on my hard drive where I have the originals saved. The problem was that I have that folder marked to be backed up by iCloud so MacOS had uploaded all my media files from that folder to iCloud (they had the little cloud with a down arrow symbol next to them) and therefore they were no longer downloaded on my hard drive.
This meant that iMovie was using an Alias file to point to the files on my hard drive. But my hard drive didn't actually contain those files on disk - it just contained the pointers to the iCloud versions and thus iMovie couldn't function properly. The few media files that hadn't yet to be uploaded to iCloud were the ones still appearing normally in iMovie.
So to work around this, I clicked on the folder of my hard drive were I keep those files and hit Download Now to download them back down from iCloud. Once this finished and I restarted iMovie, everything was working again.
Not sure why iMovie decided to use Alias files instead of making a copy of the files for itself, but things are working again.
iMovie giving "missing plugin" error on some media
