iMovie '11 is not always saving changes

I used https://bugreport.apple.com to report this bug and added in description a link to back to this discussion...

Good luck. Altough I'm rather sceptical that this would help, because the issue we're seeing here cannot be a bug.

As stated by so many others before, the loss of tons of hours of work caused by iMovie is of course known at Apple (hi guys!). I cannot imagine that those brilliant dudes in Cupertino have all become dumb and blind during - the last three years or so.

No - the only logical explanation for ignoring this issue since years is that it is not a bug - it is, indeed, a feature. It turns iMovie into a kind of supense-game. Isn't it quite thrilling to wonder oneself if and when iMovie eats your project? What modifications does it store - which ones does it ignore? In which mood is it today? Come on -Siri tries to give boring software a human touch, too. And I love Siri!

Software like iMovie gives me the impression that my Mac suffers from a permanent premenstrual syndrome.

That is, of course, advanced AI, and not a bug. Apple has just problems finding a correct marketing strategy for it - that's the point.

@gudc, thanks… we will see :-D

Like @Gualo, I lost many hours (including night) of work those past days. I planed to terminate my project gently with a target for today. I missed that deadline due to many issues in the product.

BUT I believe I'VE REDUCED THE ISSUE.

Other people was close to same conclusion: @hananias reported that he seen iMovie uses more and more memory, also @Ennoxx had the issue that drives me to it I believe:

"After completing everything I tried to export the movie. It then stated that iMovie needs more memory so to quit and restart. Therefore, I HAD to restart the app and because of this lost another 4 hours of work. My Mac mini has 16 GB of RAM and at the time had 10GB free!"

I encounter the exact same situation, since I knew that 'Titles' would not be saved I wanted to do my final updates yesterday without exiting iMovie, like that I could at least export the movie with my changes….

but iMovie asked me to restart the application to gain back some memory space !!!!

And that is very bad, it make me sad, that means iMovie has memory leaks and developers know it like @gduc says, they know it since the popup to ask "to free memory by restarting the program" exist. Not only they now it, they admit with that popup that they can't find where is the issue…

Also I had another problem, the system reported me that I have a low amount of free hard disk space for the system to run correctly. I found that iMovie use temporary disk space (in the Trash folder).

So now I'm not sure which issue is dominant in the Titles issue but we have:

iMovie consuming more and more memory until some point where we have the issue: something like an exception handling when we update a title that is equivalent to

void updateTitle(string newTitle)

[

on_error_goto_next(); // ;-)

printNewTitleOnscreen(); // like this user is happy

saveNewTitleInHardDrive(); // hoping this will work

]

So this happen when you use iMovie on a long run with many updates, some of these updates have memory leaks. I suspect it is around playing the clip on fly (on fly := when you move cursor over clip, without playing "via space bar"), I noticed that at some point the sound became glitchy, and live video rendering is no more working.

Solution: when you need to Update Titles: don't do it. Exit iMovie before editing Titles, restart, update Titles and restart to confirm changes are well there (should be now :-D ).

...

I am new to this iMovie as well. I am working on a big project and cannot afford to have any errors in saving my material. Where do you find these folders - Movies, IMovie Projects, IMovie Events - that you are talking about? I have looked in preferences, file, edit, etc. but, perhaps, I am not looking in the right areas. Any help would be beneficial!

On your Mac's internal drive, find the folders in your user (Home) folder "Movies/iMovie Events" and "Movies/iMovie Projects". So, if your Home folder is named Kerri, the folders will be in Kerri/Movies/iMovie Events, and Kerri/Movies/iMovie Projects.

On an external drive, the folders will be at the top level of the drive, and will simply be named iMovie Events and iMovie Projects.

John

I have also been sitting here with my jaw on the floor for the last 2 days as I see the same edits that I have made 3 times over disappearing before me every time I reopen iMovie. So disheartening. Lots of wasted time. I hope Apple fix this asap. It also makes me look totally flaky in front of my coworkers when they tell me that the edits they requested have not been done...!!! Apple, please please fix.

After talking with and emailing Apple reps many times about this, and after seeing years of unresolved problems posted online, it's clear to me that the company has no intention of addressing or fixing this problem. They want you to move to Final Cut Pro.

You could download (if you don't mind my suggestion) the latest iMovie revision and let it convert all video projects that were created with the early '11 iMovie app when is first launched. The conversion can take some time, depending on the number of projects but, this version of iMovie renders and export videos in record time. It seems the 64 bit app is using full CPU resources and the results are very good if not excellent.

Good luck!

I have a brand new mac and imovie still has this bug! This has been going on for 2 years too long:(

Received this message after visiting an Apple site where they asked for my feedback. I thought it was funny. 😁

As at April 2014, still having this problem. Just made an extensive Movie with Welsh Titles, added the titles on top of the exisiting English translation placeholders. Exited with all Welsh titles in, re-open only to find the thing had revereted to most of the English titles. Now have to get the Welsh Translator back to re-do the whole thing?

Is Adobe any better, time to switch I think?

John M

I had the same issues with the photo titles disappearing when I proceeded to share my projects as a file or in the theater or when I quit iMovie and then restarted it. I'm using the latest version of iMovie (10.0.7).

I found that deleting the titles that kept reverting back to their original value (mine had the initial text when dragging the titles into the project), and then creating new ones from scratch seemed to fix the issue. Perhaps the issue is caused from duplicating an existing title and then changing it.

The exact same thing happened to me. My titles wouldn't save with the text I edited. It kept defaulting to the TEXT TEXT TEXT quote it gets inserted with.

Turns out..any title that I had copied and pasted would no longer save properly.

Lesson learned - always insert new titles/background etc.

I hope this save someone a lot of time!

Of course. Apple reads these posts because within seconds of my describing a devastating glitch, they removed my post for not being constructive. Guy/gal reading this (and removing it): How do you sleep at night?