iMovie Generating Thumbnails Forever

Mine doesn't hang, but takes very long. I mean we are talking very small thumbnails and my movie needed 30 of them? Why does it need to take as long as 15mins????

I have a different bigger issue. Every time I try to import something my iMovie 08 crashes. when I restart it it goes straight into generating thumbnail for the imported movie which crashed previously.

I don't want to sound like a harsh critic, but boy Apple's reputation has been taking hit on the software front lately. I think we all know why, or at least it appears that way.

Regards,

Marek

One more thing. I think that if support told you that the camera is not supported they probably don't they own product. If the camera has FireWire, it's all what is necessary and has nothing to do with generating thumbnails. As long as it's able to pass through DV stream nothing else is required. So what the support was talking about I have no clue ...

Cheers,

Marek

I too want to turn off iMovie's ability to generate thumbnail or at least reduce the time it takes. I imported a 640 Mb movie, the import took 3 minutes, the thumbnail generation took 12 hours!!! After all is said and done, I now have to export the movie to my .Mac gallery and the estimated time is 1340 minutes!!! (For small and medium rendering)

Back to the thumbnail issue, I looked at the iMovie Events folder and the thumbnail for the 640 Mb movie is 650 Mb! I wouldn't call that a thumbnail, would you? No wonder it took 12 hours to generate.

There must be some setting somewhere to turn this off or Apple should try to eliminate this obvious bug.

Tried importing another QT movie and while the movie copied pretty quickly (100 Mb), the thumbnail is again taking a long time to do. The finished thumbnail is as big as the movie, what gives? Is there some setting that I am missing here? Or do others see this problem as well, which means it is a bug waiting for Apple to fix.

I found a work-around, sort of.

After the iMovie finished importing the files and started generating thumbnails, I force quit the program.

The imported MOV files were left in the iMovie Events folder. I moved the files out of that folder and trashed it, then restarted iMovie and all's well.

Caveat: I'm only using iMovie to import these files because Final Cut doesn't let me use the "Log and Transfer" command on non-HD files on my camera (a Sony SR-1). I think if you want to work with the files in iMovie, you're stuck with the thumbnails.

im seeing the same thing. importing a bunch of very small mp4 files takes less than a minute to copy and about 10 hours to generate thumbnails.

ridiculous. i won't use imovie until they fix this 😟

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with this problem. Does anyone know of another easy to use movie editor for Mac? I need to splice up some video for work and burn it on a DVD...nothing fancy.

This is ridiculous! Now we are even considering getting alternative software!
One of the reasons I paid over the odds for a MB (About double compared to the equivalent Windows laptop) was for the excellent OS and bundled software.
The very first thing I wanted to do was edit my home movies, and that was going to be easy right?
It just works.
No.
First I had to spend literally days transcoding all my old movies because iMovie doesn't understand the sound in MPEG-2 muxed files.
Then I thought I would just have to drop the files into iDVD, crop out the bits I didn't want add a photo slideshow and that would be it.
Oh no. I needed to edit them outside of iDVD. Fair enough, you might even say it's a reasonable separation of the two functions, but now I am hitting the same problem as others on this thread.
Importing a 300MB file is taking hours, and the estimates are constantly changing (though never very far down).
Even this might be tolerable, but I need to make a DVD for someones birthday in 2 days time, and I have another 30GB of raw movies I need to import and edit to do it. By my rough estimate it's going to take another 6 days just to import them.
I'm screwed. But at least my massively overpriced (since the software doesn't work) laptop looks really good. And I hadn't heard the fan much until I started importing, so now it's going constantly it's a refreshing change.
Laptop AND fan heater. Perhaps that was why it was so expensive?

I was someone who was really hoping Apple would change my miserable Windows using life. But I've been so badly let down I could cry with frustration.
It's WORSE than my (old) Windows PC and software!

Shame on you Apple!

I agree. Someone at Apple should fix this now before it turns more users off--and their video creativity.
Hey, Apple--fix the code-- thmbnails shld not = humongous file size !

Been using quick time pro for my video editing, much easier.
It doesn't eat into your hard drive space by reproducing your movie over and over again through thumbnails. I-movie 08 was a bad idea.

I've just discovered something that might help.
My new video camera outputs in H.264, and all my old movies were transcoded into H.264, but there is clearly some difference between the encoding, because the one's form my new camera load into iMovie really quickly (a few minutes a movie instead of 1:30 hours).
I also found my old movies, that took all the time to import, don't actually work!!!
You just can't make movies with them! When you are previewing them by dragging the cursor over them in the event library no movie appears in the top right pane, no sound either. I guess it was unfortunate that these were the first one's I tried, as I only realised something was up when I went and looked at the video tutorials.
Now I don't think this gets Apple off the hook much. The problematic movies play fine, with sound, in Quicktime, so it seems to me they should work in iMovie, especially after taking hours to generate thumbnails. But at least I might now be able to find a codec setting to transcode my old movies in a way that I can actually use them!

Message was edited by: The MightyBoosh

totally unusable!! I was so happy with iPhone, and so disappeared with iMovie. Did anybody at Apple used this software at least once to import a real life movie? I'm now forced to setup a Windows machine again.

Download iMovie 6 and use it. Much better than 08 for doing home movies:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html

I feel your pain. I switched to Mac last year. With in a year I went from 2 PC's running windows, to now owning a mac book pro, iMac, and apple TV, and of course the ipod. Most all is good, but iMovie is horrible. It just doesn't work. I spent hours converting 90+ gigs of home videos to mpeg4, just so iMovie could read the files. I then started working with my new video files, which are 5.1 surround and captured in mpeg2 on my sony dvd cam. I'm getting closer to figuring out how to get the vido into iMovie, but I'm having to jump through countless hoops. And to think this is one of the main reason I went to Mac. Thank goodness this is my main problem. I won't, however, recommend apple to anyone until this iMovie issue is resolved. From the iMovie standpoint, I feel ripped off. I left Microsoft in hopes of a better experience. Apple better get this fixed soon. I already convinced 3 different individuals to stay away from getting a mac until iMovie issue is resolved. All three of them said that being able to edit their home videos was very important. I let them try and edit their videos on my mac book pro. After their experience, every single one of them decided to stay away for now. Two of them are now with Vista.