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

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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

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Answer 1

LinuxElf

Level 1

0 points

Dec 10, 2011 12:51 PM in response to DDT713

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!!!! 🙂🙂😁😁😍😍

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Answer 2

Nate.co

Level 1

0 points

Dec 13, 2011 1:55 PM in response to BookX

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.

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Answer 3

BookX

Level 1

34 points

Dec 10, 2011 3:04 PM in response to DDT713

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,

🙂

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Answer 4

bill2975

Level 1

8 points

Nov 6, 2013 10:20 PM in response to jiming

Try Brian's workaround from an earlier post.

I had the "heap" error and finally tried this workaround:

Use iMovie to "Export using Quicktime",
Video Settings: Compression Type = Apple Intermediate Codec; Preset = HDV 1080p; Size (in my case) = 1920 x 1080.
Audio Settings: Apple Lossless
Export = Movie to Quicktime Movie (the exported file was 33.64GB!)
Open the newly published movie in Quicktime Player, and then Export it (I used the "PC and Mac" setting). The exported file became 2.36GB, if you can believe it.
In iTunes, "Add to Library" the exported movie.
The export worked, and the file is H.264 1080. It played perfectly on my Apple TV ver 3 at 1080p.

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Answer 5

Oct 23, 2010 11:29 AM in response to DDT713

Hi

Lack of memory usually referes to two things
• RAM - which You got enough of
• Start-up Hard Disk

Less than 1.5Gb - few things works and if so in a Bizzar way
< 5Gb extreamly slow
< 10Gb slow and un-stable
I set for a 25Gb minimum

This is due to that Mac OS is not Mac OS since Mac OS 9.0.2

Mac OS X and on-wards - is a sort of UNIX and behaves like this with a burst of temp files to boot hard disk
So does also iMovie or iDVD function by use of temp files.
These needs to be stored somwhere - and boot hard disk is only place for them
(can't be addressed any where else)

So this space is vital !

Yours Bengt W

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Answer 6

Oct 23, 2010 7:27 PM in response to DDT713

This might help us...
Right-click on a clip in your Event file. Select "Reveal in Finder".
Right-click on the clip in the Finder. Select "Open With...QuickTime Player"
Hold down the command key while typing I to open the Inspector. (Or select WINDOW/INPSPECTOR from the QT Player Menu Bar).

In the inspector, tell us everything that is listed next to the work "Format:"

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Answer 7

Oct 23, 2010 9:24 PM in response to DDT713

That is odd. I would have expected 1280x720. or 1920x1080. Or 960x540.

But I was suspicious of the sound...and it looks OK to me.

By the way, it would appear that none of the regulars here have encountered your issue, so one option you could consider is calling Apple. There is a contact us number at the bottom right of this page. The Apple support people are much more likely to have encountered this. They may even have a book that tells them what the error message really means.

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Answer 8

Oct 29, 2010 8:02 AM in response to DDT713

I have iMovie '11 and cannot create a HD 1080p movie. I've got a 27" iMac with a 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7 processor (I purchased this computer last month). I tried like crazy to export the HD movie last night (it's one of the new trailers -- the one that looks like Indiana Jones & it's less than 1 minute long) but no dice due to a "HEAP" error. I tried to export the movie a couple of times this morning. It went a little further in the rendering until the HEAP error popped up again (this was from a fresh reboot). The really odd thing is that when I render it in HD 720p, my movie clips are black. No video. The built-in trailer stuff from iMovie '11 is there, just none of my clips show up (they're all black).

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Answer 9

Nov 14, 2010 1:53 PM in response to janettwokay

I've got the same "not enough room in heap zone" error when creating a trailer in iMovie '11. Brand new Mac Pro. TONS of free RAM and HD space. TONS. Only thing running is iMovie. I can "share to media browser" just fine but get this error when trying to finalize the project.

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Answer 10

Nov 16, 2010 4:52 AM in response to Keith Twitchel

Got the same issue...

Edited a movie yesterday. When I reach the export part, it start to do its thing and after a while, I get a error 333, "not enough room in heap zone" .... and it just stopped...

Tried rebooting, only iMovie running... nothing helping...

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Answer 11

Nov 16, 2010 6:31 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Macbook Air, first gen, 2g ram, 30G free space on hard drive. It is actually the first time I am trying to export with iMovie'11. The video was imported to iMovie using the '11 version.

Never had issue with previous version of iMovie. I export to desktop in quicktime format using pre setting portable (best for iPhone/iPad)

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Answer 12

pureutah

Level 1

0 points

Nov 24, 2010 8:16 PM in response to DDT713

I was having the same issue of "Not enough room in Heap Zone" and I figured it out... I have recently added some clips to my events library (200 clips to be exact). I noticed that the clips did not import correctly so I deleted them from my User/Movies/iMovie Events folder reopened imovie and it fixed the issue. I re-imported the clips and everything is working fine.

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Answer 13

Jason T.

Level 1

8 points

Nov 29, 2010 8:26 AM in response to DDT713

For what it's worth, I had this exact problem yesterday with my iMac i7 27 inch, plenty of hard drive space, and 4 gigs RAM. I was trying to export about a 7 minute video shot into a Full HD movie. I was able to export as a 720p but not the 1080p option in iMovie 11. I figured it was memory since the file size for the 1080p version is about a Gig, and the latter was only about 500 megs.

Then I read in this forum and a couple others sights that you can't have special characters in the project names. I had a "hyphen" in mine, and sure enough I changed that and restarted and I was able to export the movie. Seems quirky, I don't know what the correlation is. Applecare was useless as usual and they told me they had never even heard of the "Heap Zone" error before except with iDvd.

I guess that was the problem, although I suspect with my 4 gigs of RAM I might have been running short on memory. Activity monitor had me only using about 2 gigs of it, so who knows. I should get more memory I guess anyway.

Hope this helps, that was two Sundays in a row that iMovie consumed most of my afternoon figuring out stupid errors.

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Answer 14

Dec 9, 2010 11:17 PM in response to DDT713

NONSENSE!

you guys are all "experts" but are claiming to have a solution which isnt true.

its nothing to do with characters, i tried renaming my movie 5 times. I used hundreds of clips, well about 40, and i cant go eraseing each one and exporting a 8 minute movie to wait and see an error

anybody really figure this out

whats a heap zone, whats apple saying

HEY STEVE, this is a serious problem!

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Answer 15

MrPiv

Level 1

11 points

Jan 12, 2011 2:15 PM in response to Jason T.

Same problem with heap error, same solution: remove a hyphen from the project name. I was then able to do a 1080p movie export without the error. This may be only one fix for the problem, though since it didn't seem to work for others. Since others had to re-import clips to fix it, my guess is that the project XML has got issues that relate to path names.

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