Need to download iMovie ’09 on MacBook Pro 16″ with iMovie 10

firewireimovieimportvideovideo editing

I would like to transfer old Hi8 tapes onto my new MacBook using FireWire. I have an old Digital Sony Handycam and all of the required adapters to connect it to my MacBook USB-C ports. I tried importing a tape into iMovie 10 and while it did actually import the portion of the tape I played, the import screen on iMovie 10 had message "No Data Device Detected" the entire time and the audio could have been better. After doing some research it appears that maybe iMovie 10 is not 100% compatible with these old cameras but that iMovie '09 should still be.

So, I would like to download iMovie '09 onto my MacBook in addition to iMovie '10 that I already have. In other words, I would like to have 2 different versions of iMovie on my MacBook so I can use the '09 version to import old Hi8 tapes and the '10 version for anything in the future.

Is this possible? I did try to download '09 off the Apple site but after downloading it told me that I had downloaded an update and I already had the newer version so that bright idea didn't work. I am not a coder so if there is a way to do this without making changes in Terminal mode that would be my preference.

TIA!

Best Answer

I found a tutorial on how to extract the older iMovie 09 onto the same Mac as v10 & have both capable of running (I doubt it will work on Catalina or later, but I haven't tested)

  • Download the iMovie 9.0.9 package… https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1574?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

  • Create a folder on your Desktop called iMovie.

  • Open the imovie9.0.9update.dmg file to show imovie9.0.9update.pkg

  • Drag this .pkg to the folder.

  • In Terminal, type pkgutil --expand followed by a space, drag iMovie9.0.9Update.pkg to the Terminal window, and then drag the desktop iMovie folder to the Terminal window. Hit Backspace to remove the space, and then type iMovie so the full command is

    pkgutil --expand /Volumes/iMovie\ 9.0.9/iMovie9.0.9Update.pkg Users/[username]/Desktop/iMovie/iMovie

    Hit Enter, and wait for the extraction to complete. Then quit Terminal.

So we have a new iMovie9.0.9Update.pkg file in the /Desktop/iMovie/iMovie/ folder.

  • Right click on it and select Show Package Content.
  • In the resulting folder, right click Payload and choose Get Info.
  • In the info panel, go to Name & Extension field to add .zip extension.
  • Hit Enter and there will be a prompt. Click Add and we get Payload.zip.
  • Double click on Payload.zip which will generate a folder Payload 2.
  • Go into the Payload 2 folder, next Applications folder and Voila, the iMovie app is there!

Right click the iMovie and select Copy iMovie. Now open Finder and go to the Applications folder, right click on empty space and select Paste Item. Click Keep Both when prompts. To distinguish with the newer iMovie, it's better to rename it to iMovie 9.

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