Error when exporting my imovie project to HD 1080p

Can you right-click on one of the project clips and choose "Show in Finder". In the Finder window, right click on the clip and OPEN WITH.../QuickTime Player. In QuickTime Player, press Command-I to open the Inspector, and tell us the dimensions of the clip as well as the information next to the word "Format:".

OK I suggest that you right-click on your Event and see if iMovie offers to optimize your clips. This will convert them to Apple Intermediate Codec. It will place the originals in a folder called Movies/iMovie Original Movies, so you will still have a copy of the originals.

You export should go smoothly after optimizing.

If you do not optimize, then iMovie has to optimize on the fly, during the SHARE. This places a huge load on your computer. It is better to go ahead and optimize separately.

H.264 uses Group of Pictures compression. In this compression scheme, there is one full frame for every (say) 24 frames of video. The remaining frames are partial frames that contain info like what has changed since the previous frame, direction of motion, etc. Obviously, this is not good for editing, because if you edit out the full frame, the remaining frames are useless. So before editing or sharing, all these partial frames have to be resolved into full frames.

Apple Intermediate Codec is a full frame codec. Each frame has some compression, like the full frames in h.264, but all frames are full and they are independent of each other. You can cut wherever you like, and you can apply slow motion without worrying about where you start.

In Final Cut Pro X, you would use ProRes 422, another full frame codec.

You should expect Apple Intermediate Codec to be about 10X larger than the equivalent h.264 clip.

If you make a DVD, you are decreasing the quality from 1920x1080 down to 640x480, since the DVD standard is standard definition. So as long as you don't expect too much, you can burn a DVD. On a small screen TV, it should look fine. If you have a 50" TV, it will look like one of the standard definition channels on your TV.

So to make a DVD, you can SHARE/MEDIA BROWSER or SHARE/MOVIE. Choose Large (960x540) or Medium size. Most people report good results with Large. There is no advantage of sharing at 1920x1080 because the DVD authoring tool will just have to cut it down to 640x480.

You should also consider other options so you can view your movies at full resolution.

YouTube and Vimeo do a nice job with 1920x1080.

The Apple TV is a great way to watch your movies at 1920x1080. There are also media players out there like the Sony PS3 or the Western Digital Media Player that will display your movie in 1920x1080.

Finally, you could burn a BluRay playable disk. Toast has a BluRay Plugin Available that lets you burn a BluRay Disk, or for short movies, you can burn a BluRay format disk on standard DVD media that is playable in most BluRay Players.

Hi AppleMan1958,

what can i do if iMovie dont offer me to optimize my clips ? I want to finalise my project in 720p but i can't (error 108).

Any idea ?

I have Macbook pro 13' early 2011 with 8Gb memory

Hi AppleMan1958

I have a 'movie' which is really a slideshow of about 1,500 photos, running to 1.09 and I am getting error -108 also. Optimising clips is not an option. Its a 3.06 ghz intel core 2 duo, 16 gb of ram. I do a lot of movie creation, editing, exporting to iDVD and haven't come across this error before

Thanks for any help