Level 1

5 points

Imovie 11 export problem. Not enough room in Heap Zone. I have 32GB of RAM!

I am trying to export a five minute long clip @ 1080p in Imovie '11 and whenever I try i get an error that says something like there is not enough room in the heap zone. I read in some post about how that is how much ram there is free.

My Mac Pro has 32GB of Ram. I am only running imovie, so I don't see what the problem is. I have tons of room on my internal harddrives and this is really annoying. I've run activity monitor and have tons of free ram.

Need help, I don't know why it is doing this.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Oct 23, 2010 11:12 AM

86 replies

Jan 15, 2011 8:44 PM in response to Splurtizzle

I totally agree Splurizzle, this is a serious problem!!! I have a movie that is 54 minutes long and two that are 8 minutes. I have published the 54min movie to media browser and then burned to a DVD using iDVD once before with no problems. We maked some minor changes to the movie and now I cannot publish the movie. I get a error that there is not enough room in the heap zone. I call Apple Care iMovie experts and they act like they have never heard of a heap zone. One Apple Care guy said since I am trying to make a DVD I should share the larger movie straight to iDVD. I shared the other two little movies to the the media browser and had no problems. I tried the larger movie again but this time to iDVD, same error. Called Apple Care again, the guy was a system guy this time, not an iMove guy. He looked on this forum apparently because he said he was reading in a discussion group that you can't have any special characters (which i didn't) and sometimes renaming will fix it. Renamed it and STILL GOT THE HEAP ZONE ERROR. He told me how to varify and repair disk permissions. Did that. STILL GOT THE HEAP ZONE ERROR.

I was also having problems with iMove not saving captions on title slides and movie clips. I have had to go back a half dozen times to put the same text in. It is saving audio and video changes to the iMovies but the text would either disappear or revert back to an earlier version of the text. I even restored iMovie from Time Machine and the text were still not correct. Apple Care was no help.

Apple needs to address these issues.

Jan 24, 2011 1:26 AM in response to DDT713

I ran into the same issue, and found a couple of different things: first, that I had two clips that imported at only 2 fps, which could have caused issues. The second was a simple fix: restarting the machine. After that, the issue was gone, and my HD movie has rendered nicely. It could be iMovie trying to allocate memory to the dump files that it's already used???

Mar 25, 2011 12:01 PM in response to Freedomhawk1776

same disaster occurred with my project, 1st thing that happened I closed my laptop and editing for hours that day, total of 3 months editing actually, when I reopen laptop and imovie the next day , it's ALL GONE! everything, from this I learned , DUPLICATE , BACKUP, BACKUP, DUPLICATE PROJECT. it was a 360gb project/events size so it was a lot to back up, but after editing all that over again , it had to be done. Next disaster -this HEAP ZONE B.S., fixed it by renaming and haven't tried anything else since, but definitely worth a try. the most important lesson I learned - IMOVIE IS NOT A PROFESSIONAL APP, DO NOT USE iMOVIE FOR IMPORTANT WORK, YOU WILL LOSE, PLEASE LEARN FROM MY HUGE MISTAKE.

Apr 24, 2011 4:50 AM in response to DDT713

Make sure that nothing is plugged into the computer. (i.e. iPod, iPhone, External Hard Drive). I ejected and removed all external connections and it resolved the problem. I guess the Mac gets confused when multiple external products are connected to the machine.

Hope that this works for all.

Jul 14, 2011 8:45 AM in response to DDT713

I had the same problem with an hour long movie.

It worked after restarting the computer.

I had also disconnected all peripherals, so I'm not sure which corrected the issue.

If you have the heap zone problem try restarting first, as I assume that is what corrected my problem.

Sep 15, 2011 7:28 AM in response to DDT713

So far we have the magical rename, unplugging external devices, the always friendly reboot, removal of special characters, re-import your clips, export at a different resolution, transcode your assets to different settings, did I miss anything? Has anyone tried pixie dust and taping some four leaf clovers to the keyboard?

Anyone from apple want to chime in here? Can we get this nonsense to just work?

rémon

Level 1

0 points

Nov 27, 2011 2:33 PM in response to DDT713

Solved the -108 error by installing Lion again ...... and now I could finalize the project and export movies

Only problem now is that my video do have dramatic quality, the stuttering is so extreme that you can't watch the movie at all 😠

Nov 30, 2011 11:12 AM in response to Freedomhawk1776

I am pretty upset too about the heap zone error. I made a movie but cannot burn it. I have made over 10 movies before on my Macbook Pro 2006. I just bought the Mac book Pro 2011 with ilife 11 and have had nothing but problems. The person at the apple store they aren't supporting burning to DVD's since it is an old fashioned technology. I have 10.7.2 with 4 GB of memory. My movie is big - 55 MB - but still - it is a brand new computer and I want to burn this birthday video. I have been working on it for 3 months and tomorrow is the birthday party and I can't burn it to a DVD. Wuzzup with Apple??

Nate.co

Level 1

0 points

Dec 1, 2011 12:24 PM in response to DDT713

I had the same issue and after trying EVERYTHING in these topics and discussion boards I called Apple and they had me go through a few more trial and error attempts and then after we recorded a 10 second video in iMovie and exported it successfully (figuring out that the hardware, app and OS were working properly) The app genious said that revealed an issue or corruption in the project itself. I converted the original video files I used and inserted the newly formatted video files into the same spots as previously edited (just with them converted into a new format) and then tried to export again and I am now the proud owner of a newly exported and finalized project!

Thanks Apple!

Nate.co

Level 1

0 points

Dec 1, 2011 1:00 PM in response to elikness

I converted them into .MOV or a quicktime format.

They were recorded on a Flip camera which the Apple tech said he had heard of there being issues with "corrupt files" from those camcorders. They had been in mp4 file format.

BookX

Level 1

34 points

Dec 3, 2011 3:50 AM in response to DDT713

Hi Everyone,

I had the same issue with iMovie "The movie could not be exported because an error occurred. (Not enough room in heap zone / )".

I did the following and the problem went away: Share > Export movie using QuickTime > Options > Settings > Compression Type: MPEG-4 Video> Key Frames: Auto > Data Rate: Auto > Compressor Quality: High

For some reason H.264 compressor doesn't "like" Best Quality (multi pass) encoding … However, I was able to use H.264 set on Best Quality, Faster Encoding (single pass) w/o problem and a lot faster than MPEG-4 Movie, but the file size was 5 times larger.

It's unclear what is going on since all video clips were imported dirrectly with iMovie from the camera.

Dec 6, 2011 12:08 PM in response to DDT713

I as well as the above posters could not encode a 1080 movie for output using the H.264 encoder. The stock "Export" as well as "finalize" also failed to encode,. The errors I saw were varied. Sometimes I got the "Not enough room in heap zone /", sometimes iMovie would crash during the encode. I saw that the crash datums were being sent to Apple,. Hurrah.

I tried things mentioned above, like cleaning caches, verifying sufficient free drive space (>1TB), permissions, etc. None of that worked for me.

THIS FIXED THE PROBLEM FOR ME: Use iMovie to "Export Quicktime", set to Apple Intermediate Codec at 1080. I then open this movie in Quicktime Player, and Export. This export works, and is H.264 1080.

BookX

Level 1

34 points

Dec 10, 2011 1:24 PM in response to LinuxElf

Apple Intermediate Codec at 1080 is a faster single pass encoding - that's what I had too. Unfortunatelly, is not a permanent solution... What's intresting is, why I don't see this on my old MacBok Pro (BUS 800Mz w/4G RAM)?... Indeed, takes hours to encode, but it gets the job done.

BookX

Level 1

34 points

Dec 11, 2011 5:08 AM in response to rémon

I'm sorry, you need to be more specific and consistent with your posts... Specifically, did reinstalling Lion changed anything at all, or not?

Please describe/quote the type of error you encounter or see on the screen.

Did you recently upgrade the RAM, HDD(s)?…

BookX

Level 1

34 points

Dec 13, 2011 3:39 PM in response to Nate.co

I agree with you. Converting it is fine and does work pretty well. I convert it to mpeg4 w/o problems and even Apple Intermediate Codec at 1080 single pass encoding...

I've noticed that during encoding in Max multi pass quality, free RAM kind of gets less and less available to the point where the error pops-up... Encoding starts nicely with 4.4 Gigs to spare, but after 15 - 20 minutes, I even seen it only at 720MB to spare...

Time Machine is not even configured and the only running app is iMovie, yet strangely lacks RAM. I'm still looking what else did I missed... I did everything by the book and no culpirit found.

😟

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Imovie 11 export problem. Not enough room in Heap Zone. I have 32GB of RAM!