Heap zone issue - One solution/Work around

Like many of you, I was plagued by the nasty "heap zone" bug in iMovie11. After spending hours upon hours editing a project to completion, I was unable to export it despite having 10 times the hardware needed to run this app well. In frustration I resorted to tinkering with my project in iMovie11, and after spending nearly as much time dissecting and experimenting as I did editing to begin with, heres what I found out. Also keep in mind this is what I found to be true on my system and may not be the case with everyone.

iMovie11 has trouble rendering movies with alot of things added into them, such as music and sound effects, picture in picture effects ect... My project was not HD video, but fairly low on resolution, and it was less than an hour long. However, I had somewhere between 50 to 100 sound files added in and several picture in picture overlays. This ended up being the problem. With this amount of extra stuff in my project, iMovie just couldnt handle rendering it for export. Heres how I found this out, and what I did to fix it.

First thing I did was make a backup of my project on an external drive. This is crucial. Next I went back to my original project and began deleting audio and such. After deleting over half of my audio clips and music files from the project, it suddenly decided it could render and export. But I didnt want to delete my audio clips. So I restored my project back in full with my backup and tried something else. This time I deleted the last 3/4 of the entire movie leaving only about the first 15 minutes of my project in iMovie. Again, it had no trouble rendering and exporting. So I exported the first 15 minutes or so in a format that had maximum quality and repeated this process another 3 times exporting about 15 minute chunks of the project each time. Each time I finished an export, I would delete the entire project in the finder and bring it back from my backup drive so I could select the next section. Once I had all 4 sections exported as separate movie files, I started a new iMovie project and imported each of these 4 files back in. I had cut them accurately, so they lined back up perfectly and now iMovie only had 4 objects to deal with instead of the hundreds from before. I then re-rendered and exported the entire movie without issue.

Now, it is true that this solution requires the movie to be rendered and compressed twice, so there is a loss of quality and it probably wont be a good solution for those of you using HD footage. But for me and my low res movie footage, this wasnt a big deal and I was happy to give up a little quality to just have a finished project. My hope is that some of you might find this work around helpful and be able to finally get those projects exported.