Random Diagonal and Horizontal Lines when Played or Rendered

Question

Random Diagonal and Horizontal Lines when Played or Rendered

I'm getting random diagonal and horizontal lines when video is played or rendered in iMovie. I thought it was a video card issue, but I used Media Browser to render the video, created a DVD in iDVD, then played it back on my TV, and the lines are still there. In fact, there are also lines showing up in the menu of the DVD, which was created by iDVD (not iMovie). I didn't have this problem with iMovie '09, but to be honest, I can't remember if I've used iMovie '09 since I installed Lion. So I don't know if it's a iMovie '11 problem or a Lion problem.

The problem seems to be the most noticable when using high resolution still images, Ken Burns effect, with moving titles. Although, that's really about all I'm doing on my current projects (book trailers), so I don't know if the problem is there with regular video.

I have iMovie '11 (recent new installation) with Lion 10.7.2 on a mid-2010 MacBook Pro 15" with 8gb RAM.

Some of the artifacts you see in this still are due to the video being paused, not the problem I'm discussing here. But you can still see the horizontal dotted lines and the diagonal line is certainly obvious.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 8 Gb RAM

Posted on Dec 24, 2011 7:37 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 24, 2011 10:18 AM in response to Randy Farnsworth

After additional searching, there appears to be a couple other threads on this issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3235844?start=30&tstart=0

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3346065?start=30&tstart=0

It's not an isolated issue and it's not a recent issue. It seems to have been happening ever since Lion came out, on different applications.

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Answer 2

Dec 24, 2011 12:27 PM in response to Randy Farnsworth

More information: I've confirmed that it's not hardware specific. I transferred some projects via external hard drive to another computer (a new iMac with Lion and iMovie '11) and the problem was the same there. That's a quad core computer with half a gig of video ram, so I doubt the problem is related to slow hardware.

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Answer 3

Dec 28, 2011 8:08 AM in response to Randy Farnsworth

Still More Information: I've confirmed what others have also confirmed. I exported my project from my Lion machine onto an external drive. Then I opened it in iMovie '11 on a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and the problem went away. And that was an older 13" machine without an i5/i7 chip -- it has the Core 2 Duo chip and much less system RAM and video RAM. So the problem seems to be only with Lion and doesn't have anything to do with how powerful or new your machine is.

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Answer 4

Jan 1, 2012 9:30 AM in response to Randy Farnsworth

I took my computer to the local Apple store and showed them the problem. The particular genius that I spoke with hadn't heard of this before, but he did assure me that Apple follows these forums and will eventually do something about it. (Not sure how accurate that statement is.)

Anyway, he offered a few solutions, some of which have been talked about on other threads:

1) export project to a hard drive and finish your work on a machine running Snow Leopard.

2) partition your hard drive and install Snow Leopard on the extra partition, then do your project there

3) find another machine with Snow Leopard on it, put your original machine in firewire target mode, then connect to your project from the SL machine via firewire. If you have two machines, this is probably the easiest because you don't need to partition or export or anything like that.

And, keep sending Apple feedback until they get this fixed.

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Answer 5

HenryLop

Level 1

4 points

Mar 19, 2012 1:04 PM in response to Randy Farnsworth

Hi, I have the same problem. I just sent a feedback report to Apple explain exactly the same problem so I hope these gays resolve this situation soon. I have a Macbook Pro 15 Mid2010, and though that my problem was the memory because I upgrade to 8 Gbs, so I changed it to the original 4 Gbs and did not work. Then I uncheck the Automatic Graphics Switching box to use high-performance graphics (Nvidia GeForce GT330M) and did not work too. Now I have read your comments I realize that this problem is related to software. Thx

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Answer 6

leahk

Level 1

8 points

Mar 26, 2012 1:25 PM in response to HenryLop

Yes this is really annoying - and the fact that nearly a year on, Apple have done nothing about it is inexcusable. I too first noticed the problem after Lion was installed and went through the worry of thinking I had a hardware fault. I only make about 10 iMovies a year and it was last October that I last made one so I had forgotten about this issue. Then today, I am making my first iMovie of 2012, and there is this horrible line at random intervals a couple of time a minute.

Why arent they addressing these problems. They also have the calander bug introduced with iLife 11 where only the first event is included on a date - I have to use a complicated work around or boot an old copy of Snow Leopard that has iLIfe 09. I am not going to create a third install of Snow Leopard + iLife 11 to get around this iMovie/Lion bug.

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Answer 7

Jul 27, 2012 7:21 AM in response to leahk

Copied from my posting elsewhere:

YES! It's fixed in Mountain Lion!

I've been using Macs for nearly twenty-five years, and I've never seen Apple produce a more buggy, problem-plagued OS than 10.7 Lion. And that includes the transition from Motorola chips to PowerPC, the transition from PowerPC to Intel, and the transtion from OS9 to OSX. There were more bugs, bad features, poorly-implemented changes, and downright crappy design in Lion than in anything Apple's ever done, including the low-end Macs of the early '90s.

Anyway, I'm glad it's finally fixed.

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Answer 8

leahk

Level 1

8 points

Jul 27, 2012 7:38 AM in response to Randy Farnsworth

Great - just tested and it looks like it's fixed, presumably by Mountain Lion. It's disgusting that Apple ignored this problem for a year and didn't even bother to acknowledge it.

They have forums that they don't particpate in.

The have feedback pages which they tell you they wont respond to.

They really do show contempt for their customers.

Anyway, glad I can finally ditch that bootable copy of Snow Leopard I had to keep, just to be able to use iMovie.

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