BUG: iMovie '09, Audio Sync Problem on Export

I'm having all the problems mentioned above.

When I watch my movie (iMovie 09) the muted audio tracks do not play, but when I export, audio tracks that are muted appear in random places. I've tried detaching all muted clips and deleting them, but I still have this problem. Another movie I'm working on also had syncing issues as it got closer to the end of its 10 minute runtime.

I'm using custom speeds in both movies, while that may be contributing to my off-sync audio, it is not contributing to totally random audio clips appearing in random places.

Any suggestions?

morefiction, I wouldn't be too sure that the custom speeds aren't the cause of your problem. There is a wide variety of symptoms reported in this thread, all of which seem to relate to the use of custom speeds. The problem I reported today isn't one you would expect to custom speeds, but when the speeds are put back to 100%, the problems go away.

My fix so far has been to break a project in two, the first part being the bit with custom speeds in it which cause the problem, and the second part being the rest, where the problems arise, then concatenating the generated QuickTime movies in QuickTime Pro. That has worked for me.

I just hope Apple manages to find out what's wrong and deal with it - pronto!

As mentionned before, I have faced the *same problem* with the lastest version of iMovie'09 (*8.0.4 - 807* I think).

Symptoms:
When I use a custom speed to slow down some video clips (actors presentation or "starring scene" at the beginning of my movie for example):
- When I export my movie: the audio tracks of some other clips (not all) further in the movie becomes out of sync with the video
- When I play my movie within iMovie using the "full screen preview" button : the audio tracks of some other clips (not all) further in the movie don't play at all.

Workaroud:
As mentionnend in a previous post, I changed the speed of clips using a custom speed to a preset value (25% or 50% in my case). The problem does not appear anymore.

Due to this behaviour and the use of preset value, my starring scene is now out of sync with the music I chose. I m a bit disappointed. However, this doesn't remove the fact that iMovie'09 is a great product.

*So, I would like to ask the responsible of iMovie to take into account this bug for the next release.*

Thanks.

Greetz.

Selim

Message was edited by: Selim D

Message was edited by: Selim D

I am completely nuts about iMovie 09, it is addictive, but this is ridiculous. They need to fix this audio bug already. They should have fixed it months ago.

I had used custom speed on 2 clips at the beginning of my project and was experiencing these erratic audio anomalies throughout. Removing custom speed & detaching audio on every video track fixed it for me.

I'm having the same problem with unwanted audio bursts. I recently uploaded a 8 minute video to youtube only to discover later that there are various sound bursts from the original audio that "i know" were removed. I then pulled it from youtube and rechecked my video.

After rebuilding it 4 times, I deduced that there must be a bug in imovie that allows random sound bursts when the video is exported (no matter what format). So much for imovie. It's pretty embarrassing to hear "talking" over the music track after you've used the "share" function to upload your movie. I later exported this last video revision to my HD to screen it and discovered it's worse than before. Completely recreated the video and still random audio bursts all over the place. I give up. What a waste of time. Used to be a nice program.

I've been having the exact same problem on a 20 minute movie I finished about mid August. I have been patiently hoping for a fix since then and now I am furious to find this thread and see this has been going on since March and it hasn't been fixed yet!? This is outrageous! I don't want to get all "Vincent Gallo" here but the pre-set speeds don't work for me. Some of my clips are only 2 seconds and the pace at which they go by is important. Apple needs to warn its customers, "Hi, I'm a mac but if you want to put any manner of art into your movie, talk to my friend pc here and his friend Adobe. If you want cookie cutter crap that may not work anyway, I'm your man."

I have been working on a video all summer and had not experienced this audio problem until just recently. Until just yesterday, I have been able to make movies without any audio issues. Now I am having the same problem with audio blips occurring in clips where I know the audio was muted. And I do not have any custom speed settings so I know that is not the problem. If anyone comes up with a fix, it would be a big help.

I am having the exact same problem with the random audio blips in clips that are supposed to have been muted. Coincidently, the problem only occurs in clips towards the end of a 23 minute video - similar to morefiction's situation. I don't think it it an issue with custom speeds because I am not using any. All of my clips are at 100%. I too hope Apple comes up with a fix soon.

I finished my first imovie project a few months back, exported it idvd and burn to DVD...assumed that I was done, I deleted my original clips, then put the DVD into my player to check it out. About 15 minutes into the project, the audio started to slowly come out of sync, and then random audio clips from completely different scenes were being mixed into other scenes. I cried, it was so much work and I was extremely upset.

After about a month of research on the problem and another month of working up courage to re-do the project (I still had my original tape of footage), I built up the project again, this time I decided to detach all the audio from my project. Halfway through the 40 minute project, something got messed up and Imovie completely hung. Everytime I clicked on the project I got the spinning pinwheel for hours, I even left it on all day just to see if it would ever come out of spin. Nothing happened. So, I checked to see if it was just that project or if it was the whole program giving me problems. I started a new project and fortunately, was able to work on it.

So, another few weeks of working up the courage to start this again, I built up the project. This time I made 2 main changes:

1. All clips in which I changed the speed in anyway, either faster or slower, I detached the audio tracks from those clips, and those clips only
2. All clips in which I decided to adjust the speed, I used the preset speed choices rather than typing in my own desired speed.

I exported and burnt the project to a DVD, this time checking the DVD before deleting the original clips (although I promised that if it didn't work I was going back to my PC video editing programs). Fortunately for Imovie, it seems the project completed successfully and all audio/video is correctly synced in the proper time line.

It ***** though that you pay for a program and it doesn't deliver as it says it should, and Apple hasn't yet fixed the problem, which is really a major one program problem! But those two workarounds to the audio situation seem to have worked out so far.

Best of luck to anyone else with this problem!

I have the same problem as everyone else and i have tried extracting the original audio and deleting it, instead of just muting it. I have also tried to change all my custom speeds to preset speeds. that didn't work either. i went to an extreme and removed all speed changes, which also didn't work.

however, the issue was only happening to the last half of my video so i removed the last half and the audio then published just the first half. to my luck the whole video was silent. then i went back to the full project and deleted the first half and all the audio tracks. i published it and once again it was all silent. i then imported both halves back to imovie and added the audio track. and it all worked, no more crazy audio.
this solves the problem if you only have a few audio tracks.
however when i published the movies with quicktime, the colours were inverted or something. so try not to publish it to a .mov format.

hope this helps.

I seem to have gotten uncommonly lucky while stuck in the same situation. Here was my path for success.

1. I deleted the music track (I only had a single song, but I kept all of the voiceovers) exported my screwed project using quicktime and customized in by clicking on "Options"custom using the Apple Intermediate Codec at 720HD (1280x720),

(not sure if made a difference or not, but I had already detached the audio on all of my clips.)

2. On a whim, I also clicked on the Sound "Settings" button and changed the quality to "Best."

3. I took the exported file and re-imported it, planning on doing manual fixes with the original media spliced back in over the bad parts then re-add the music to avoid sound issues from imperfect splices.

4. But low an behold, the new file which I had imported to a new event was fine. I dragged the whole thing into a new project and added the music track back on, and it was perfect.

5. ***** not being able to better control the music track volume, but it sure saved me a lot of workaround time.

I hope others can troubleshoot this better using my luck as a starting point.

Perhaps it was as simple as changing the sound settings to "Best?" Not sure which step made the difference.

I have ANOTHER incarnation of what I think is the same bug, but affecting the VIDEO too...

I have a 2 minute video that I want to play in slow motion, so that I can overdub a voiceover description of what is going on in the video (karate training video)... When I set the speed to 33%, or even SOMETIMES using the pre-programmed 50% or 25%, the video will go through 2 minutes of slow motion video at the right speed, but then start the video over from the beginning for the second and third 2 minute interval.. So, instead of seeing the full 2 minute video in 6 minutes of slow motion, I see the FIRST two minutes three times... ***??

SOMETIMES I can recover the video by moving the slider back to 100%, and then back to 50%, but not always...

I'm a NEW Mac guy, coming from 25 years of PC experience, and I bought this MAC because it "just works", but I have to say, this is VERY disappointing.. Especially since I even upgraded to the Snow Leopard, and it made no difference.. What's the deal? Does Apple fix bugs like this? Microsoft gets a bad rap for so many updates, but at this point, I'd welcome an update or two to this!!

-Steve

Unreal. Seems the only pleasure I get out of my computer anymore is making movies and now I've spent two days trying to troubleshoot a problem that apparently Apple has known about for months and is quite frustrating and irritating and has made me finally wish I had a PC. My PC friends pump out music videos all the time without this nonsense. I don't mind it taking a long time to complete a project, but two days of going nowhere is just stupid. I won't look at Apple's commercials the same again.

I've made a 5:11-minute music video using a number of 2-second video clips, of which some need to be slowed down to sync with the music. But it sounds like it doesn't matter whether a clip's speed is affected; the output still contains audio that can't be found anywhere in the Project.

Five minutes of movie-making. Taken three days, two of which were troubleshooting for naught. What's the point of iMovie? I was beginning to think it was that my iMac was running out of enough memory to do the job. Now I think I don't care. I'm gonna look into PCs since movie-making is what I want a computer for in the first place.

I just experienced this exact issue. But thanks to this thread I was able to fix it! You guys rock!

I found a few clips I had that had a speed other than the presets. I changed it to a preset, and just to be safe I detached the audio from them as well. Worked like a charm!

Thanks!

I sure hope Apple fixes this soon. Total pain in the butt.