iMovie '11 audio either doesn't sync with a clip or doesn't play at all.

Others have been having this same problem with iMovie '11 but Apple support claims that it is unaware of an issue. I had been using a Flip MInoHD with iMovie '09 for over a year with great results. My Mac recognizes the Flip as a camera and imports directly. I had no problems. However, with the upgrade to iMovie '11 things are a mess. All seems OK until I "share" a edited movie with my Gallery or the media browser, or presumably other. The audio gets badly out of sync, and even drops out altogether at the end. (The audio progressively lags the video.) To make matters worse, if I try to reedit and export old projects that worked fine, the new problem appears. That makes useless a hundred or more saved projects. The same video clips still work fine on other machines with iMovie'09. You will see other reports of this problem in these discussions. I called Apple Support and they blamed it on a "Content" problem. However, I had no problem with content for the previous year! I tried to deal with Flip support, but they essentially brushed me off by saying that they do not support third party software or hardware. I would have thought they would have at least given me some info about the structure and format of their clips.
I am still trying to find some way to recover. It is risky to go back to iLife '09. You can extract the audio from each clip in the project and that seems to work, but is not a good long term solution as it messes with fades and transitions and other audio edits. For now, I have to say I would not buy a Flip product if I planned to use it with a Mac until the dust settles. I would also not upgrade iLife to '11 until I was sure I was not going to have that problem.

I don't think the problem lies with the Flip camera; I'm having exactly the same issues using videos that are recorded using quicktime x recording from a webcam at 30 fps. The issue seems to have something to do with the way iMovie converts h264 video clips into its intermediate codec for editing. If you I import the clips without "optimization" which actually means conversion to intermediate codec) then the audio sync issues also show up on inside of iMovie. you have the option at that point to 'optimize' each clip separately which fixes their audio inside of iMovie. However, sharing them still results in sync issues.

I'm having the same problem!

When I export my movie some clips are totally soundless while others are all out of sync! It ruins the entire film. I wanted to get my clip finished in time for Christmas but it doesn't seem that is going to be possible. ARRGH! So frustrating!

Is there anyway to fix it?

I'm also having the same problem of no audio and the audio that's left is out of sync.
I've tried the Share>Export Movie and also File>Finalize and in both cases the same problem.
My raw movie came also from a FlipHD Ultra. Playing the finished movie in iMovie everything works fine, the problem is when I want to export.
I'll try to go to the old version of iMovie (which I saved....).

Pedro

I've been using Kodak zi6 and iMovie 11 since it came out and it's been working just great.

I decided to buy a Flip Ultra HD today, and having the same audio sync issues as above when exporting.

I am having the same issue and I am getting fed up with Apple. I had iMovie 09' and was having issues with video vanishing and not exporting. After spending 3-4 hours on the phone and backing-up all of my iMovies I went out and purchased iMovie 11. I have had this for 5 days and after editing a video used with my Canon camera I am experiencing lost audio and out of synch audio with iMovie!!! This is ridiculous! There is an obvious flaw within iMovie 11 that needs to be addressed.

I posted most of this in another discussion. Here's what I know so far ...

I havent experienced no audio - only very bad synching issues.
It all looks and plays fine in iMovie and as individually exported clips
Things go bad when the entire movie is exported - mine is 1h8min long
It's nothing to do with the export quality - 1080, 720, large, ... all the same
I tracked down the first clip that i thought had the synch issues (about 8min into the movie), deleted it, and exported again - same problem.
I use 2 or three cameras for my clips and for many years (still, HD, iPhone). '09 Version with same equipment did not have this problem.
I'll try and go back to '09 - hopefully it will read the events and projects as I don't want to re-edit it all, but at the moment I cant share this with anyone except out of IMovie itself - useless.

My recommendation is not to use IMovie '11 until they sort it out.

Moved everything to my old Mac with '09. Here's the rub ...

'09 can read 11's events but not its projects and I'm not going to re-edit now.

I'll hang off until the next patch comes through for 11 and I'll try that before going through that pain again.

Very disappointed / frustrated.

Same problem here. This is what I am planning to do:

1) Trash all the rejected clips from the events folder
2) Go back to iMovie '09 on my other MacBook (I don't want to mess up my iPhoto library by downgrading the whole iLife '11 on this Mac)
3) Re-edit (since I've trashed the rejected clips already, I'll save some time!)

Will let you know if that works.

Yeh real mess for me with iMovie in iLife11. Using a JVC plus a canon camera the embedded audio is fine when playing in iMovie but any share or export causes the embedded audio to get randomly out of sync. Super huge mess and I have no iMovie09 left as I upgraded all my computers - huge pain. The only way I got it to sort of work was detaching the audio but that trashed the transitions and the movie sounded like cr--. Spent ours getting detached transitions to sort of work like embedded. This really needs to be fixed as it renders iMovie11 almost useless.

By the way the JVC and Canon camera - never issues like this before in older iMovie releases.

Cycle11111 - For the sync issue you are having, are you using iMovie 9.0 or 9.0.1?

with 9.0.1 you should no longer have to detach audio to prevent AV sync issues.

Jim2006 wrote:
Cycle11111 - For the sync issue you are having, are you using iMovie 9.0 or 9.0.1?

with 9.0.1 you should no longer have to detach audio to prevent AV sync issues.

The iMovie 9.0.1 update didn't fix it for me. I hope the next update will fix it (and soon).

cliffonthemoon - I'm asking specifically about the case where Cycle11111 needed to detach audio in 9.0.1 to keep AV sync, and now you don't need to do that in 9.0.1

What exactly is your AV sync problem? What format, frame rate, video standard? Is your problem with playback in iMovie or the exported movie?

Jim2006 wrote:
cliffonthemoon - I'm asking specifically about the case where Cycle11111 needed to detach audio in 9.0.1 to keep AV sync, and now you don't need to do that in 9.0.1

What exactly is your AV sync problem? What format, frame rate, video standard? Is your problem with playback in iMovie or the exported movie?

Apologies. Frustration galore with iMovie '11

The problem is with export (Share with iDVD, Media Browser, Export Movie, Export using QuickTime, all produce the same results): the audio goes out of sync.

I'm now on iMovie 9.0.1, and my project is at 4:3 Aspect Ratio, 30 fps/NTSC Frame Rate.

The camera is Canon PowerShot SX1 IS, and the movies I am importing in to iMovie are .MOV files, 30 fps clips.

Have deleted everything, reimported, exited and still the same. I've done this three times already, and even trashed the imovie PLIST files from ~/Library/Preferences all iMovie related files from ~/Library/Cache. Still no joy.

Planning to go back to iMovie '09 ...