iMovie Crashes

Do you have external drives connected? Your camcorder? Memory cards? A DVD in your drive. iMovie '08 sometimes crashes on startup when it probes all your drives for the presence of a DVD or harddisk camcorder. If you can have any such drives, temporary disconnect them, and see if iMovie starts up.

Same problem here - Since installing iLife08 iMovie will not open - it crashes on opening and gives me the message "iMovie unexpectedly quit"

I have cleared all iMovie files, preferences, done a reinstall of iLife08 and still it will not open.

I have no external drives open (I have an iPod dock, but when I launch iMovie no iPod is connected)

Does anyone out there have any suggestions?

I have done all the same things all have said to do on this forum. Still the same thing. The only thing that kind of got it to work except it would not link up with iPhoto was to...

Open on a different screen name. Open up movie 7 and it works.... and copy the com.apple.movie7.plist file then move it over to my main account. And move to the preferences. My imovie will then open up, but will not get the stuff from iPhoto.

I think after all I have tried will be either move to a new account on my machine just to use iMovie or do a clean reinstall and start over. Neither will I do. So I think all we can do is send the report to Apple thing and hope for a new update as soon as possible.

I have exactly the same problem. I have an external drive connected with all my videos on and when I start I Move it opens briefly and then crashes, It is ok when I disconnect the external drive. Does this mean that this software will only work when there is no external drive connected. if so, I dont want it! Any advice please?

It seems that iMovie '08 checks the contents of your external drives when it starts up, to see if it might be a HDD camcorder that it should allow you to import from. As it scans the drive, certain files seem to trigger a crash. I recommend you use the "Submit to Apple" button to send in your crash report. Hopefully that will help to get this problem fixed ASAP.

I am having the same problem - iMovie 7.01 crashes shortly after I launch it. I have tried deleting preferences, as well as removing all non-Apple plug-ins from Quicktime (as suggested in another thread). This does not correct the crash.

I did find a solution that does, but it is not a satisfactory solution. I suspect, as others have indicated, that the trouble occurs as iMovie is trying to deal with the short videos housed in iPhoto. (I don't have any reason to believe it has something to do with external hard drives.)

To solve my problem, all I have to do is move my iPhoto library out of the "Pictures" folder. iMovie will launch then. As I said, this is clearly not a solution.

I hope my input will possibly spark others ideas. I will watch this thread hoping for someone to report a fix! Thanks all.

More info: Dave provides another temporary solution.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5128875#5128875

Remove the iApps.plist file from yourusername | Library | Preferences. Then your iMovie will (should?) work. BUT, if you use iPhoto and then try iMovie again afterwards, back to square 1.

has anybody checked out the macfixit solution. I googled imovie kernel crash and got this link:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070829090333753
I'm not a member (yet) But judging from most posts nothing usefull has com up yet. some think little snitch gets in the way, others think it's 3'rd party quicktime pluings.
personally I've found out that the ilife 08 package kernel crashes all the time, EXECEPT when I used another account than my regular one. This means something in my current account f.. up ilife. So far so good. Now it's hunting season. What causes ilife 08 to crash in (Our) accounts that a lot of people have?

cheers

The DVD in the drive tip sounds good to me. I never had a problem with iMovie '08 until today. I had two DVD's in the internal drives on the Mac Pro burning DVD's from disk images using Popcorn and Toast 7. iMovie '08 crashed on launch 3 times in succession. After burning the DVD's & ejecting, iMovie '08 started up as usual. You might double check to make sure you didn't leave a DVD in an external drive, as well.
iMovie '08 checking for connected HDD cameras on launch makes sense to me. A regular DVD would have a different file structure from what iMovie '08 is looking for in a connected HDD camera?

My iMovie crashed when he seemed to stan for media and I ejected my two external drives and that fixed the issue.

This must be something that Apple is working on.

I have the same problem that iMovie crashes 100% of the time on start up. I have NO external drives, camcorders, or anything connected.

I have a feeling it has something to do with the 339 movies totaling 15 GB that I have in iPhoto. The first time I started up iMovie, it took an hour to make thumbnails, and crashed after that, and every start since then while the round progress indicator was displayed in the lower frame. I have yet to be able to actually use or try out iMovie on my brand new computer.

Thanks for the information - this fixed the problem. Hopefully Apple is working on a solution.

Just installed iLife today on my MacBook and had the same problem. I checked for software updates, downloaded the iMovie update (7.1) and the next launch was fine.

Has apple fixed this yet?

This is a brand new Mac Pro, with a brand new HD camcorder and I can't even open iMovie for the first time.

It simply quits on start-up.

Pretty dis-satisfied customer here... where's the iGarbage can?

Do any of you have a DivX codec installed? Such as Perian, DivX, Xvid, or some other decoder?

You can check in your /Library/Quicktime folder. For some users (my macbook for one) removing these codecs fixes the problem. Your mileage may very.

If you do attempt it, I recommend you make a copy of your codec in a safe place, just in case you want it back.