BUG: iMovie '09, Audio Sync Problem on Export

I tried many of the suggestions here, but the only thing that worked for me was removing a transition that occurred near where the audio became out of sync.

Good luck everyone - this is a pretty ridiculous bug. This is why we use Macs, right?! To avoid this kind of stuff. 🙂

Cheers,
jdp

Hi all - just ran into this so here's my workaround. Finally got a properly synched version by exporting as the highest quality Quicktime (this might be like the DVD option someone else mentioned) but the this was huge at over 2GB - so as a single file I re-imported and made it the size I wanted - no problem.

Next project I took all speed adjusted sequences (yes I needed 2000+%) and exported them at high quality separately - then inserted them in the project as needed. Piece of cake and worked like a charm.

If you already have hours into it just do those bits as a new separate project and then drop them in as needed.

Hope this helps.

AppleMan1958 wrote:
The fix has been posted hundreds of times if you will do a search.

People complaining about not having a fix for over a year are talking about the BUG, not the workaround.

Sure, you can avoid custom speed settings and detach audio but that's not how iMovie was intended to function.

If Apple can't handle fixing this BUG, they should really concentrate on totally removing the +"custom speed option"+ feature from the interface. Why give users an option that only breaks the project?

No matter how many workarounds are posted here, there are no excuses for Apple not fixing this issue in one way or another.

Yes, but you should talk to Apple. In this forum, you are talking to other users.

AppleMan1958 wrote:
Yes, but you should talk to Apple. In this forum, you are talking to other users.

Apple may not participate much in here, but they do monitor and moderate threads.

Additionally, when many people are complaining about a single Apple issue and it rises to a level of seriousness like 17" CRT Studio Displays burning up or MacBook HD failures, news outlets such as C/NET pick up on it. Sometimes this additional pressure does some good.

This type of popular and persistent bug damages Apple's reputation of things "just working".

I have spent over 40 hours on my project, and it is NOT a viable option to go back and re-set my video timings to the pre-sets. I would rather use different software that WILL work; if I have to re-adjust and re-time every single minute, I am not going to do it in iMovie as it has already made me so mad.

I just wish it would be fixed. Or, they should never have given me the option to adjust the time manually. I've spent so much time troubleshooting OTHER issues in iMovie, only to come to this final roadblock.

My audio is being played over top of my movie, NOT from the muted clip itself, but from other clips that appear over 30 minutes later. Once the clips start playing, it just goes through every single one of them, playing one after another, overtop of my muted clips, from a completely different section of the movie. It is a BUG and I want a fix.

This problem did NOT happen in earlier versions of my exported movie. I am thinking it is due to the size and/or complexity as I add more clips and media to the movie.

Hi Guys, i'm experiencing the same problem.

After working 2 weeks (about 60 to 80 hours!) on my project, the export to 720p failed, video looks good but the audio is totally corrupted, out of sync and audio of clips didn't match at all.

Apple: When are you going to fix this problem!!! I saw this problem is know for more than 1 year! I love your hardware, but the software needs to be updated more frequently. Hope to here from you soon.

Kind regards from the Netherlands

Hi all 🙂 Dont know if this would help anyone out there:

I was working on a music video so i used various clips and i adjusted all to various speed (e.g. slow down to 85% and 65% in different clips). After i sync everything with music (mp3 song for the music video) and published the movie, i noticed there are some original sound of the clips appearing here and there.

If you faced the same problems, this is what i did:

1. Duplicate project (Just in case you clicked something wrongly keep one as backup)
2. Publish movie (let's call it movie001)
3. Open the same project, delete everything (both videos and audios) or you can start a new project
4. Import movie001
5. Drag and use the whole clip
6. Mute this clip
7. Add mp3 file
8. Publish movie (let's call it movie002)

It should work, or else after step 6, follow this:

7. Publish movie (let's call this movie002, which should be all your clips but no audio at all)
8. Open new project
9. Import movie002
10. Drag and use whole clip
11. Add mp3 file
12. Publish movie (lets call this one movie_final!!!)

Voila! There you go! Mine works fine now, no extra or unwanted noise! 🙂

Lemme know if it solves your problem! :DD

I think I may have found a solution as well.

The problem occurs when the AUDIO is custom sped up or slowed down. Meaning, even though you change the video speed, by doing so, you are also changing the audio speed.

Here is how to fix it:

1. Detach the audio from the clip.
2. You can leave the video clip at its custom speed, but click on the detached audio underneath.
3. Once selected, change that audio speed back to 100%.

It worked for me.
Hopefully it works for you too.

I am starting systematically to correct the audio snafu's on my 55 minute project. I'm hoping the snap to timing settings work. I have totally happy with Apple's performance so far with my new Macbook Pro, but I'm getting scared. A lot of people are counting on me for this video.
I am having the same overall problems. Workarounds are a pain. I have spent hours already.
We'll see. Burning tonight.

OK PEOPLE!!!! LISTEN UP...

After putting weeks of time into editing my wedding video, which turned out to be 73 min long, I have spent almost as much time trying to fix this audio export problem. I have about 20 songs and many various sound clips, so re-adding them to a video-only movie was out of the question. So, I'd like to thank everyone who commented in this post. Because after literally 30 hours of trying to figure out how to fix it, I spent 30 minutes today setting all my customized slo-mo clips to the iMovie standard of 25% or 50%, AND IT WORKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No more sound clips in the wrong place - coming from muted clips that are later in the movie. Everything worked perfectly.

Finally, I want to add that I have Apple Care, so I called Apple about this problem about 2 weeks ago, and after over an hour and talking to 4 different people in tech support, I finally talked to the lead tech of software support, and all they could say is that it's the video from my camera that caused the problem. Goes to show that they are ra-tards there, because you guys on this thread figured it out over a year ago, and they still don't know about it!

Thanks again everyone.

I have the same problem, and changing the speeds to 100, 75, 50 and 25% works to fix it.

I submitted a bug report to Apple and hope that they fix it.

Thanks Appleman, I actually found thIS thread a short while after I posted somewhere else.

May I say this whole thread makes for a very sorry read indeed.

APPLE YOU SHISTERS ! ITS BEEN NEARLY 2 YEARS THAT YOU HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THIS APPAULING GLITCH IN YOUR SOFTWARE THAT HAS NO DOUBT DRIVEN TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YOUR CUSTOMERS INSANE. CUSTOMERS THAT PAID YOU A LOT OF MONEY FOR THIS PIECE OF ***** YOU CALL IMOVIE 09. SORT IT OUT YOU SLACK JAWED *******. WHERE DID YOU LEARN TO TREAT CUSTOMERS LIKE THIS, 'THE BILL GATES SCHOOL OF BUSINESS' ?

I'm having audio sync issues with a project I've been working on in both iMovie 09 & iMovie 11. I am working with about 40 minutes of raw material imported from an mp4 file - my HD camera's transfer software converts files from AVI to mp4 automatically. I no longer have the original AVI file. By splitting the large clip into smaller segments in iMovie and then trimming those clips for precision, I've gotten my project down to under 15 minutes. None of the clips in my project have speed adjustments. I've tried exporting through iMovie's "Export Movie" feature, as well as exporting through QuickTime. The first off-sync clip appears just after the 5 minute mark, and things degrade pretty quickly from there. Clips alternate between being in and out of sync at pretty much every transition after this point. After the 10-minute mark the audio off-sync, sometimes early, sometimes late. At 11 minutes, the audio just cuts out completely - this coincides with 2 very quick transitions stringing 3 short edits together. From this point until the end of the video, I'll get maybe a second or two of audio (still off-sync) here & there, but that's about it.

In a nutshell, my final product is completely useless in this state. All the audio used is directly from the footage, none of it is added later. Detaching the audio from the video files just messes up the sound at every transition point, so that isn't an option either. If anyone can help, I'd really appreciate it, I really can't afford to lose the 10+ hours I've put into this video project already!

We went back and re-adjusted our slow and fast motion clips to the [snap to] presets. Hopefully they fix it cuz i dont wanna pay for '11...