iMovie '11 is not always saving changes

i have spent 4 months working on 3 big projects and have now discovered that my final step (voiceover) is obviously not going to work, after reading all these posts. Yes titles are not saving but to hear that the voiceover, idvd finish product and titles changing etc, has killed my work..

Thanks a lot apple.. shame on you!!!!

I called Apple on this. They wanted met to create new user account and then make a movie in the new user account to see if this would solve it. Obviously I had now desire to hang onto the phone for an hour to do this, just to prove to them that the bug is a bug.

So the guy then told me to go to the apple feedback page and put in a complaint. Apparently Apple doesn't read these posts, only the feedback area.

So everyone please do this....maybe then it gets fixed.

Incredible but true. Apple released a new version of iMovie, 9.0.4 (1634) with bug fixes... but the titles bug is still there!

Hey Apple! Anybody there listening to us users? I just can't believe they didn't address this problem!

I may be paranoiac but with the new versions of FinalCut coming out do they want us all to drop iMovie to BUY FinalCut instead?

Anyway, sad as it may be I'm back to having to do tricks and hacks to save my work

Shame on you!

Another iMovie user here with the same problem of changes not being saved...... c'mon Apple, get it sorted!

iMovie has indeed always been a buggy program, and I had never had problems with title slides until today (with the exception of scrolling text, which I always thought was a problem because I had too much text for it to handle). Now I have, as well, lost a good hour or more of work ... which ***** when you're up against a deadline.

Anyway, I agree with the one person who believes the problem might be in text fields that were copied to another clip. That's where I had the problem ... with about 30 different title slides.

And for the guy who was told to create a new user account and iMovie there, that's actually what I had to do to even use my iMovie. It simply won't open in my original user account, no matter what I've tried. This also *****, because now I have to use shared folders to access my files, and everytime I want to change something or open an image or whatever to edit, I have to either enter a password, or go back to the original user account to access it (as Photoshop and other programs won't let me open them in my new account.

Simply put, Apple does not care to acknowledge these problems because they're too busy selling iPads. And iPhones before that. And iPods before that. I love myself some iLife, but c'mon. Now with Steve Jobs gone, there may be other competitors out there who want to be what Apple use to be ... a maker of great products for its loyal customers, as opposed to a tech giant for the masses.

I've got the same problem. Only the last title seems to be saved. A very nasty bug!

Did you by chance get any resolution to this issue? And if not, where can I find the 'feedback' page you reference in your post. Thanks so much!

It is October 2011 and I am still encountering this issue. Just spent an hour plus going in and redoing my titles which weren't saved. Additionally I find that some titles go back to their generic content i.e. Directed By.

PLEASE - someone at Apple - address this issue and provide an update on this forum.

I am also having problems with the titles reverting back in iMovie '11 on Snow Leopard. My workaround is to keep iMovie and the Mac Mini on at all times. I use it at my work (I create e-learning videos for my company) and in the evening, I just put the Mac Mini to sleep, iMovie still running. In the morning I wake up the Mac Mini and continue with iMovie. Even then, I sometimes have disappearing titles (usually when I switch to another project). And it is a lame work around anyway. Apple should just fix this bug.

I just had this problem again when I wanted to Duplicate a Project. The project that was duplicated lost a few titles. I checked some other work arounds, like the priveleges, but I already had them. I then delete the duplicate project, rebooted the Mac, restarted iMovie and tried again. Guess what. Now also the original project, that I wanted to duplicate, had the titles back to an earlier date! Aaargghh. The good news was that when I fixed the titles in the original project and then created a duplicated project, the titles remained OK in the duplicate. Funky stuff, this bug...

I can confirm that the titles that were affected where titles that I have moved around. It also seems that titles that I copied the frame of and then did a 'Duplicate last title' and then edited, remained (largely) unaffected.

So creating fresh new titles might also be a workaround. But in my case the title frames are customized, so I really want to copy them, not newly create them.

I can remember reading that someone mentioned that doing an edit to another part of the movie, after the last change to your titles, might help to preserve the titles. (Then the last change to the movie was not the title but something else. The titles being the last thing that changed, might also cause this.) But I think I have been in situations where this didn't help (the duplicate project problem for sure).

Anyway, very annoying and very disappointing that Apple does not seem to care enough to fix this! 😟

All tips to work around this problem (by Apple or otherwise) remain very welcome! 🙂

It's still a problem in imovie 11. I installed the software and it crashed on me in the first half hour and now it's not saving. They've had over two years to fix the problem and put a save button in the software but chose to ignore the issue. I believe they want people to buy their new product Final Cut Pro X which is basically imovie pro. It's got the same layout as imovie and imports imovie files, which final cut pro wouldn't have been caught dead doing. Apple if you use shady tactics like these to get people to upgrade to your pro version, don't expect people to pay for it, it can be found on the web for free. Catch my drift?

Hello Everyone,

I can't believe I have the same issue with iMovie as everyonelse here. Seriously, what is going on? I lost almost two hours and a half of work on my machine... nothing was saved. Why?

I have a Quad Xeon, Mac Pro, packed with RAM and 3 and a half Terra in hard drives dedicated for movies and... I'm lost. What is causing this iMovie "amnesia"?

I've done some research and I noticed that my iMovie projects are quite large. One current movie project of mine, including all its events, is about 95 GB in size. Since all my projects are in HD, I had to check all the other projects as well, simply because I could not believe the size of the first one. Initially, it turned out that the 95 GB iMovie project is only 2 minutes long. All other projects are longer than 10 minutes and HUGE in file size and events.

What I've done is I went to the store and got me an ATI Radeon HD 5770 and replaced the old Nvidia in my Mac. Next, I moved the projects and their events from the local drive to a secondary internal HDD and … the problem is GONE. I was able to finish my video project in half the time and everything was saved; nothing was left out.

Basically, when I was working on video projects with the old card, iMovie couldn't finish rendering in the background my project because of lack of performance… the video card couldn't keep up.

I've done some research and I noticed that my iMovie projects are quite large. One current movie project of mine, including all its events, is about 95 GB in size. Since all my projects are in HD, I had to check all the other projects as well, simply because I could not believe the size of the first one. Initially, it turned out that the 95 GB iMovie project is only 2 minutes long. All other projects are longer than 10 minutes and HUGE in file size and events.

What I've done is I went to the store and got me an ATI Radeon HD 5770 and replaced the old Nvidia in my Mac. Next, I moved the projects and their events from the local drive to a secondary internal HDD and … the problem is GONE. I was able to finish my video project in half the time and everything was saved; nothing was left out.

Basically, when I was working on video projects with the old card, iMovie couldn't finish rendering in the background my project because of lack of performance… the video card couldn't keep up.

Thanks for replying back to the group with a description of what you did. This is very interesting info and makes me wonder if people are using Mac Air laptops how they are able to edit video that is High Def video from a currently made video camera. This might account for a lot of problems people see when doing work on much less powerful computers with integrated video graphics cards and slower processors.

It depends a lot on the size of the project… For instance, I've also noticed that if I'm using a lot of green screens on the time line, multi audio tracks, transitions and special effects, done in Keynote, there is no way a small laptop can handle the workload of the video. Since one HD frame is almost 3 megapixels and the technology is moving away from anamorphic (4:3) to full HD, the processing demand by the application is going to be huge. Basically, none of the professional looking, HD quality videos out there, were done on laptops.

One time, I was able to do basic transitions and great HD videos on my MacBook Pro (early 2008 w/800 MHz) but I couldn't even go as near to green screen and other FXs.

A week back, at Apple store, I tried some cool stuff in iMovie on one of their new portable quads; on a MacBook Pro with Intel i7, and I can say that kind of computer packs the right power for Pro videos…