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

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??

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!

Hello Nate.co,

I'm curious when you said you converted the original video files, what new format did you save them into?

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.

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.

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.

THANK YOU! to Brian Flaherty!

I have experienced exactly the problem you describe for about one year -- sometimes I get "heap zone" error, sometimes iMovie just crashes.

On a 12-core Mac with 16GB RAM, I was outraged to be having problems with memory!

However, have just tried Brian's solution, and it looks like a winner!

Not only did iMovie export my 56-minute basketball-game film into a 1080 Quicktime movie, but it also did so in only ONE HOUR -- a process that had been taking AT LEAST SEVEN HOURS with the H.264 Best Quality setting. And the size of the file is about the same. (SEVEN HOURS on a 12-core Mac!! 😠)

I AM SO HAPPY! Apple should hire Brian, since he has figured out someething Apple Support has been unable to respond to for more than one year!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Brian!!!! 🙂🙂😁😁😍😍

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.

Hey, BookX!

What do you mean it's not a permanent solution? I will eventually run into heap errors using this method as well?

LinuxElf

I've searched Apple's website for a solution and it turns out to be a basic maintenace procedure that needs to be performed if things go awry after upgrading harware (RAM, Video Card, etc.) This procedure clears the heap zone error too... It cleared mine for good and I was able to encode in matter of minutes on my quad.

Here is how to reset parameter random-access memory, a.k.a. PRAM

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/26871.html

Best regards,

🙂

Well I did reset the PRAM and still get error -108 (heap zone) ... so apparently it does not solve the problem for everyone ....

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)?…

Well, I thought this fixed the issue, but after my fourth movie (8 min longer) I got the ERROR back on the screeen. Close, but NO cigar...

Anybody else? Ideas?...

I believe the best answer is to convert your orginal footage. I did this with my project and have had no issues I have exported several since and no issues. I don't think that the issue is with the RAM or the HDD I think that iMovie '11 is much more sensative to what type of video format you are using. The people I have talked with say that MPEG4 and .MOV are two of the better types for iMovie.

With previous generations of iMovie I have NEVER experianced this issue and that is editing HD footage with a powerPC Mac. It seems that whatever "improvements" have been made in this release of iMovie there "seems" to come a sensativity to format.

If your footage is in one of those type of file extentions already iMovie may think there is a corrupt file within and converting it may fix the issue.

Some converters are: FLVCrunch, Toast, Burn, Miro, Kigo, Adapter.

I use FLVCrunch and toast the most.

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.

😟