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"The Evil Ampersand"

I was working on another home movie - i know, i know, i've turned into one of "those people" - the ones who drag out the home movies to bore their friends and family - but honestly, people do ask to see mine, i put a little flair in them and i do know the meaning of the word edit, but enough of me justifying, that's not the point... anyways... there i was dragging clips into the timeline and i noticed i was missing a number of video clips from a recent event.  I opened iPhoto and i could see and play the AVI's so i knew they were there, but they did not appear in the clips in the Event Viewer in iMovie.  hmmmm.  Help to the rescue, and i don't mean superhero type help, i mean the little "Help" at the end of the toolbar in almost any program.  Help works great as long as you know how to ask the right question, sort of like searching the web, its an art to be able to find exactly what you are looking for, but again, i digress.  In this case, a couple of quick questions to Help and i had found what i was looking for, it seems the ampersand is a special character as seen in the resolution list...

I closed iMovie, renamed the event in iPhoto and then restarted iMovie and low and behold was asked if i wanted to create thumbnails, which means iMovie had found more video files to add to the event library.  Woohoo!  Simple fix, but still, i would have suspected a quick popup note in iPhoto as i was naming the event in the first place.  If certain characters are going to cause problems, why not give you a heads up.

Well, now back to my editing, i just thought i'd pass that little bit of info along in the hopes of saving someone else a few hair-pulling moments.

TCG