imovie error code -108

I closed all other projects.

Cleaned the project.

Closed all other apps.

Rebooted.

Export in 1080 does not work.

Right.

You do have some more things to try then.

Try to do it the way I mentioned above yet.

Like going to the Apple store and let them export it on a bigger Mac? Export in 720 is working by the way.

It has been said in this thread (as well as in a lot of other threads), but here it is again:

Turn off Time Machine while running iMovie to avoid a lot of different problems (including export problems).

Slightly off topic: Do not use Time Machine as your only backup. Store multiple backups off site. Think fire, theft, flooding, lightning, hurricanes, you name it...

Maybe I explained it in another such discussion.

In my case the source of problem were transitions with text. Try to put your transitions once again and rewrite texts in it.

I discovered that I have 3 slides slideshow with one transition and it almost always does error-108. I have thrown away this transition and put once agait.

Than everything went well. Maybe there was in text some invisible sign that caused failure in calculation, I do not know but it helped and I finished my projects.

Transitions are critical for calculations as I observed.

Good luck.

I don't have TM on. I use a RAID5 NAS for backup.

Thanks for the advice. But I have over 500 photos in my movie with fading FX between each photo. I don't have texts with transitions. If there was something wrong with the project, exporting to 720 would also fail.

I had also a lot of photos in my slideshow. This FX between them work strange. I had also situation that I did 720 and could not do 1080. Try to exchange these FX.

If you want to export a movie use normal export not export with Quicktime. This export with Quicktime is more sensitive.

I duplicated my project so I could disassemble my project piece by piece.

This way I hope to find which item is causing the error.

I removed all transitions.

Export in 1080 failed with error -108.

I removed all text.

Export in 1080 worked.

To me it seems that iMovie crashes when it hits 4GB. Although I have 8GB installed, it is unable to use all memory because it's not a 64-bit app.

I will do more testing...

I started again from a duplicate of my original project.

I removed all text.

Export in 1080 worked.

I started again from a duplicate of my original project.

I replaced all text with new ones.

Export in 1080 failed with error -108.

Memory usage of iMovie was never above 1.5GB.

As I wrote, there are some bugs in text routines or transitions. Unfortunately iMovie has another critical bug. Look at your photos especially dark pieces, shadows or night shots. You will see spots instead of luminance gradient. It makes project quality uacceptable for me.

I noticed the compression artifacts. Even exporting in the highest quality through QuickTime didn't remove them. It resulted in a 10GB movie (28min @ 720) of good quality. Not the excellent quality I was hoping for.

To obtain good quality I used mp4, 2-pass encoding, bitrate 6000 and see no artifacts. Only these awful spots but it is independent of codec you use.

I started again from a duplicate of my original project.

I trimmed it down from 28min to 5min.

Export in 1080 worked.

There is nothing left for me to do except waiting and hoping this will be fixed in iMovie 12.