Is it normal for iMovie to "hang" periodically for a minute or so?

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Level 1

8 points

Is it normal for iMovie to "hang" periodically for a minute or so?

During the creation and editing of an iMovie '09 Project involving a large Events file (~60GB), iMovie will hang unexpectedly for up to a minute and display the "spinning wheel of death". After the hang is over, both my Project and Events widows are repositioned, so I have to reposition both widows to where I left off before I can resume editing. Can I avoid this inconvenience by breaking up this large Events file into several smaller files? What would be a good maximum size for my Events files?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.5GHZ, 4GB RAM, 750GB HD

Posted on Oct 25, 2011 10:11 AM

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Answer 1

elikness

Level 4

2,640 points

Oct 25, 2011 10:25 AM in response to JLDG

I don't there's a hard limit on the file sizes in iMovie. There's no hard limit as to how many hours you can keep in an Event folder either.

But one hour of video clips in a single Event folder I think is a good limit to adhere to. Similarly no single clip should be longer than one hour either. I say this in part as an old video guy who only could video tape one hour onto a single tape before having to switch out to a new tape. And that's originally what iMovie was geared for was MiniDV tapes each one hour long, so try looking at your Event Folders and the clips inside of them. Splitting things out to seperate Event Folders might be beneficial, but I would divide things based on runtime as opposed to file size.

Other things that can affect how iMovie runs are other programs that might running in the background like Email, a Web browser, iTunes, Word processor, etc. Less is more when you are editing video, give iMovie all the resources it can use by shutting any other programs that might be running.

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Answer 2

JLDG Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 25, 2011 12:11 PM in response to elikness

Thanks for the reply and suggestions. Let me clarify. I'm not concerned about a hard limit on Event file size. What I am concerned about is the inconvenience caused by iMovie being unavailable every time it "hangs", and the inconvenience of having to reposition the Project and Event windows each time it happens, which can be 3 or 4 times during a short video editing session. It would wonderful, and way less frustrating, if I could find a way to avoid these iMovie "hangs". I estimate that the total time of the video clips in this Event is on the order of a half hour, so I am already under your suggested 1 hour limit. I have tried to close all other programs and that does not seem to help. My guess is that iMovie likes to work with as much video in RAM as possible, and when I select a clip that is not already in RAM iMovie "hangs" while a lot of paging goes on between the HD and RAM. Does that sound plausible? That would imply that my event files should not be much bigger than my RAM (4GB) if I want to avoid these "hangs". That would be about 10 minutes of 720p HD video per event.

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Answer 3

elikness

Level 4

2,640 points

Oct 25, 2011 12:30 PM in response to JLDG

I think you're onto something there, also are these clips imported as Full Size versus Large size? The iMovie default is the Large size of 960x540 and gets optimized to this on import. Full Size footage might be something like AVCHD at the Full HD size of 1920x1080 and that will definitely slow things down a bit. If you don't mind cut things down to 10 minute blocks, that might be worth a shot see how iMovie reacts.

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