Note: this is what I’ve found to work for iMovie ’11 (9.0.3) running on Lion 10.7.3

I was having a bitch of a time just importing the 15 minutes of video I shot with my iPhone of our daughter hunting Easter eggs into iMovie yesterday.  Her grandparents, who live 1,000 miles away, really wanted to see video the video that I shot, and I was getting really frustrated in my attempts to share our video.

After some preliminary searching, I found a few threads where it was recommended that you delete the iMovie preference files (Home Folder>Library>Preferences) Look for anything like com.apple.imovie… and simply delete them.  I found two files:

com.apple.iMovieApp.plist
com.apple.iMovieApp.plist.lockfile

Note: if you’re having a hard time finding your Library directory, take a look at my article here.

It was also recommended to repair disk permissions.  I didn’t think that would do anything, but I tried it anyway.  To repair your disk permissions, go to: Home Folder>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility.  Then, select your hard drive in the left side of the app and then click the ‘Repair Permissions’ button in the main section and wait for Disk Utility to do its thing.

Unfortunately, deleting preference files and repairing disk permissions didn’t fix my problem.  iMovie was still crashing when I tried to import my videos from iPhoto.

Finally I found a fix that worked for me.  Simply move your ‘iMovie Projects’ folder and then delete it from the ‘Movies’ directory.  Your iMovie Projects folder should be in the Movies folder of finder.  I simply copied mine to my desktop, and then deleted it from ‘Movies’.  Apparently there’s a tendency for something to get corrupted in the iMovie Projects folder, and when it’s deleted and iMovie is started from scratch, all is well again.