Any way to edit video in iMovie after establishing multiple audio tracks?

Question

I've painstakingly edited audio from two separate tracks with my video in iMovie 2011. Now I want to trim the audio+video in certain areas. However, all I am able to do is select a portion of video, and delete it -- but the audio remains unchanged, so now audio is out of sync with video.

There seems to be no way to "merge" the audio back together with the video, or "link" them somehow, before trying to edit.

Next I thought maybe I can import into Final Cut Pro X and have more control. So I imported it, but it brings everything in EXCEPT all of the edits I made to the audio levels in iMovie.

Now the only thing I can figure to do is to export the iMovie project as a video (in Apple Intermediate Codec?) and then re-import that back into iMovie as a new project, where I will then perform my video edits. But this seems hacky and probably would result in a loss of quality, right?

Answer 1

The workaround I came up with was to go ahead and import the iMovie project into Final Cut Pro X, and then export the project from iMovie as a movie file with high quality audio.

Then I imported the exported movie into FCP, detached the audio, and then delete that video clip. That left me with the better sound track from the exported movie file, with the original video quality from the iMovie project.