BUG: iMovie '09, Audio Sync Problem on Export

Holy Crap! I think the adjusting the speeds back to the presets actually worked upon export to iTunes so far. I noticed that this bug seems to affect everything after the custom speed clip in the timeline. All footage played fine until it came up to clip with custom speed. When I split the projects into 2 parts and reset speeds of the first part to the presets, I noticed that the First part had no more weird auto interruptions from muted clips, and no bad audio from the 2cd part-even though I never reset the custom clips which appear at the very end. I guess the custom speed clips only affect the audio of the clips succeeding it. Seriously ,go through EVERY single clip and make sure you're set to the preset markers, save yourself a ton of disappointment until the bug is fixed.

Message was edited by: bryant carr

I experienced this bug along time ago, and was waiting for iMovie to fix it.
Eventually, I decided to try some of the workarounds that I had read of. But before I started with any of them I tried my last resort, which for me seemed to work:

I duplicated the project twice and split it into 2 parts (delete the clips in the project) each of about 5min long. I exported both separately and the problem was gone.

I am how reliable this approach is as is the only project that I had this problem. But since it is super easy I would recommend trying it. My movie was made up with lots of short clips, transitions and of course the custom speed settings on some clips.

I have experience the same maddening BUG with audio on export. Like other posters have said, the problem seems to be with speed settings. My project messes up with ANY speed adjusted clip, whether it be custom or slider.

On the phone with Apple support today, and they said even after you delete a clip from the project file, iMovie still retains some info in the database file for the project. They were unable to help me with a fix (no surprise there)

Just to clarify, the fix is

1. Don't use speed adjusted clips (i sound like a PC user!)
~~~~or if you have to
2. Figure out what clips you want to speed adjust, stick them in their own project file one at a time, adjust the speed, export at highest quality, and then import the sped up clip into your original project file. A pain, but it does work.

The phone support at Apple also said "when you detach the audio, and delete the video footage, the project file still retains the original video footage but puts a "video mute" command on it". He said that the best result would be to do all of the audio in garageband.

That is not acceptable.

Other problems with iMovie seem to come from how it (doesn't) handle different file types. If your iMovie is slow, with lots of spinning wheel, try the following:
1. close iMovie
2. hold down option key and launch IPHOTO
3. create new iPhoto database. call it "empty"
4. close iPhoto.
5. launch iMovie. notice how much speedier it is.

whenever you work with iMovie, use the empty iphoto database. you can switch between iphoto databases by holding down the option key whenever you launch iphoto. you don't really browse iphoto pics and video in iMovie, do you? according to apple, iMovie cannot readily recognize all of the same formats that iPhoto can. So if you have a lot of videos in your iPhoto database, it takes up a lot of resources trying to sort them out.

while i'm on the subject of posting imovie hacks and fixes and workarounds, here's another one

if you have a Flip HD camera like I do, and detach the audio, iMovie makes it left channel only.
1. prior to detaching the audio, use the "convert clip" command.
2. Once iMovie is done converting it, detach the audio
3. and enjoy beautiful stereo sound from the Flip's awesome bi-directional mic (it's not that bad)

hope this helps someone. this comes after 6 months of using iMovie on a weekly basis. today was my last project and i hope i NEVER have to use iMovie again.

Did you ever figure out a solution to this problem? I'm having the same problem and can not figure it out. When I watch my 20 minute project in iMovie 09 it looks and sounds perfect. When I send it over to iDVD there are annoying bursts of random sound. All original and edited clips were muted in imovie so I can't figure it out. I've tried saving the file as different sizes and it didn't help.
HELP ME!!!!!

I did this after someone mentioned it earlier in the thread. Nothing changed. I'm going to kill my computer!

SAME ISSUE!!!

so i'm making a random video where i made some of the clips speed up to 125% by clicking settings of the clip then it says "convert entire clip" then you can alter the speed.

when i publish it, the video turns out weird, like at some points, the voices are not in sync with the video.

HELP

I've been having this problem as well. I can't believe it isn't fixed yet, since it's been around for so long now.

When I have a precisely edited video, it's unacceptable to have to set your speed change speeds to only the snap values, if that will even fix it.

I'm hoping to try replacing the audio tomorrow as per the suggestions given.

Hey all, just wanted to say that it worked for me. I was about to lose my mind trying to figure out why the audio kept starting 4 seconds ahead of my picture in a particular section. I wasted a few dvds, spent multiple 25 minute sessions waiting for rendering...nothing worked. Then, I came across this thread and tried just one of the fixes; adjusting the speed of my video to the preset speeds contained in iMovie. I had a few in there that were set at 65%, 73% etc, for editing purposes. Changed them all to the presets and adjusted the length of other clips accordingly. Viola! It worked. No sync issues. DVD burned flawlessly and the audio/video were in perfect sync. So, here's one vote for giving this shot a fix if your a/v is out of sync...worked for me. Good luck. Apple really needs to address this.

Based on this thread, I fixed my sync issues by changing the slow-mo clips in my project to 100%. It wasn't that critical of an effect, so I didn't mess around trying whether the preset speeds were a salvation, but going back to 100% certainly was.

Thanks to those who have posted in this thread for the help. No thanks to Apple for not fixing this obvious, repeatable, cause-and-effect bug. I've filled out the feedback form here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/imovie.html Everyone else should take a minute and do so, too.

Thank God for these forums. So I've been dealing with the same problems as described below: I have all of the clips in my movie slowed to 80% and one of the last clips I split and made half of that clip 50% speed. Then I muted all the clips sound. When I published the clip to the media browser I could hear sound on some of the clips, even though I had the sound muted. So I duplicated the project, split the audio from the movie clips, deleted the audio, remuted all the clips even thought the audio was deleted, and republished it to the media browser. Nope; I could still hear the movie clip audio on some of the clips! Finally, after reading this post, I selected all the clips and brought the speed back up to 100%. Unmuted then remuted all the clips, then slowed all the clips to 80% speed. (this time I DID NOT have one clip at 50% speed). All clips were at 80%. I republished to media browser and TA-DA!! My clip audio is finally gone! Presto.
Apple really needs to fix this. This is a big oversight and is something we all have to deal with anytime we adjust the clip speed. Not cool.

I can confirm this audio problem with speed adjusted clips. Just got back from Disney a few days ago and edited a 32 minute video. About 5 minutes in I had a 130% muted clip preceded by an 80% muted clip. minute or so later after the music ends I have sync sound come back in. It starts then stops abruptly then comes back out of sync. For the rest of the video sync is mostly out but sometimes is good. I readjusted those two clips to 100%. For the record, later in the video I have a bunch of clips set to a preset of 50%. These caused no problems. All is good now. Also I found a quicker way to test if you have a problem. First, I know people are having this problem going to DVD, but the problem exists when exporting other ways too. Based on that, I started testing my video by simply exporting with the Mobile preset. This allowed me to convert the entire 32 minute video in 13 minutes on a two year old iMac. Once I knew it was right, I outputted in high quality.

I switched from an HP / Windows with Power Director as my video editing software, to my new Mac and iMovie a couple months ago. The interface and tools are really similar on the editing software. When it came to rendering and burning, I was stunned to have the same problem as most of you. After all the hard work of editing, adding the perfect transitions and background tunes... it played well in the program, but after I burned it, the sync was off...way off.

My project was 35 minutes long, a trip we took to the Amazon River recently. About 15 minutes through, the audio wasn't in sync. I even downloaded Final Cut X in hopes of redoing it all...read this forum's thread and a couple of others and gave it one final try. I went through every single clip in my movie and *changed the speed to the pre-set ones created by Apple*. In other words, I changed the 83% speed I chose to what was pre set in iMovie, generally 50% or 100%.

Like other posters, sometimes we manipulate the speed percentage, adding more "seconds" won't work. Sometimes we need to slow a .8 second frame to 2 seconds, especially of there's text to read, or a transition. The change wasn't all that drastic. I did it last night and was totally successful!!! Burned three discs and all are perfect.

Grateful for everyone's advice here. Thanks a lot for the help!

My workaround: because i have very much audio snippets in my project which were mostly in perfect sync with the movie scenes by adjusting the movie speed with various values, i didn't want to lose all that work by switching to the predefined tempo values. So i found the following workaround:

i exported the movie as you all did to get the final movie with the 'damaged' audio track. Then i did audio hijacking with this nice program 'Audio Hijack Pro' ('WireTap' would also work). I played the complete movie within iMovie and got the audio track as an hijacked file.

In the final step you have to create a new project, import your exported movie and mute the audio of the footage. Then add your hijacked audio. Then export this to iDVD or whatever you want. (It was a little bit astonishing for me that the exported movie and the added audio track were in PERFECT sync till the end)

BTW: to substitute all audio in the premier project with the hijacked track did not work; the latter was overdubbed by the same audio snippets (probably coming from a cash of iMovie). So you have to make a new project to get your hijacked audio together with the video.

This will help all of you until Apple will have done their homework 😟

---

Just another hint: for my soundless 'Super-8' footage i used the fabulous 'BBC sound effect library', which consists of 60 CD full of sound snippets for almost anything. google for it, it's totally FREE (but +20 GB).

Thanks for posting and following-up on this issue. Before: I used custom clip speed adjustements that I entered them numerically.

BEFORE: Movie played normally in iMovie09. However, when I played the results of numerous export attempts (iDVD, Media browser, Quick Time export, ...), they all behaved the in the same way. Audio simply switched off somewhere in the middle of the movie after playing an event where I adjusted speed to 60 %.

AFTER: I changed speed to from 60 % ( numerically entered) to 50 % using slider. Works great.

I agree apple should fix this.

Okay i had this same problem about 2 days ago until today when i figured out how to fix the stupid, random noises that appear in movies when you export them. If you're like me and make music videos, having random noises popping up anywhere is annoying. So here are the EASIEST ways to fix this bug and it is 100% GUARANTEED to work:
1) If you are beginning to make a music video, before you even start you should mute every single video clip in your event. To do this get all the clips you need in one event then select all the clips and mute them by going to Edit-Mute Clip. All of your clips are now muted when you insert them into your project. There is no possible way for random noises to appear if there is no audio in the first place. Make your music video and enjoy the awesomeness.
2) If you have already made your music video then it's going to be even harder but do-able. Start off by muting every single clip in your event (as described above). Delete the music track that goes along with your MV in the project, but make sure you have a copy of it saved! Select all the clips in your project and copy them. Make a new project and paste the clips into the project. Here the clips and transitions, etc. may not have the same times and effects as before. Add the music track to the project. Fix up the project to be EXACTLY the same as the previous project by continuously referring back to your old one. However if you wish to edit your project now would be the time. When you have successfully fixed up your MV, delete your previous-considered failed-project. Now if you decide to export your video, what do you know! No random noises anywhere. Mission Accomplished!