ERROR -50 ... IMOVIE EXPORTING PROBLEMS. PLEASE HELP!

Hey All-

I didn't have to delete any short clips either... I took the last posters advice and found 'consolidate media' from the drop down menu under 'file' in iMovie. But instead of hitting consolidate media, I tried 'Finalize Project'. It took about 45 mins for the project to finalize, but once it did, I was able to then share/export with no issues. I should add, my video had a bunch of short video clips and pics, many were under 2 secs. The whole video is just at 3 mins long. Hope Finalize Project works for you too!

Sidenote, if your video contains a song that you don't have the rights to use, Youtube will most likely not allow you to post, or will eventually pull, your video. I typically add songs that I like for background music to my videos, so I've run into this issue. An alternative is using dropbox. I recently downloaded dropbox to my mac, so now in iMovie I can simply hit 'export' and download movie directly to dropbox. Once in dbox, I can email the video link to whoever I want. Of course, this doesn't have the viral play that YTube provides, but I'm not looking to go viral, just want to send my videos to my friends and family.

OneMann

http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2012/02/23/imovie-not-completing.html

Solved: imovie not completing (error -49) on Lionhttp://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2012/02/23/imovie-not-completing.html#solved-i movie-not-completing-error-49-on-lion

Tags: APPLE

I had the problem when exporting a big 1080 movie that iMovie would quit with an “error -49” when it was almost finished. A smaller 720 pixel movie would be OK.

In the end I found the solution on an apple discussion page. Apparently the error means that the file is already open in write mode. And the bigger the exported movie, the longer it takes to run (of course). And, that’s apparently the problem, the longer that time machine can try and stick it in a local snapshot directory on your laptop. See a full explanation of that local snapshot thing.

The solution: run sudo tmutil disablelocal in your terminal to switch off the local snapshots.

Thanks to elikeness for figuring it out!

Not using iMovie, but FYI I am getting the message "Couldn't complete the last command because (ID=-50) Result Code = -50" when trying to convert TiVo recorded TV shows using Toast 11 Titanium on a MacBook Pro OS X 10.6.8 w/750GB HD. The file sizes are ~5-6 GB, I had successfully completed converting 15 of these shows and many dozens of others over a year period before the problem started. I am able to go back and successfully repeat the process on previously completed show files without a problem. I am trying to determine what has changed on all of the subsequent show files that causes the Toast conversion to produce this problem.

I faced this issues last night. LUckly i overcomed it by simply not choosing adding movies to Theater during the exporting process.

My system: iMac mid 2011, iMovie 10, using on the basic HDD

Hello,

I had the same issue using the latest version of iMovie.

The issue came from the fact that I didn't cut the clips, I just resized the yellow holder thing there in, no idea how that action is called sorry, but not doing it this way removed the error for me.

I hope it helps.

Hi im an i movie newbie and this problem is really frustrating me , how do i stop it exporting to the theater ??

See: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5785580?answerId=24511871022#24511871022

Geoff.

Hi did you fix problem? When I click the share button on iMovie and choose share to file.

this box comes up. I just untick the "Add to Theater button you can see. It works for me.

this *****!!! i have a job to finish and the error -50 still apearing, i dont have any -2 sec clip, not even 5 sec. i consolidated, NOTHING work, please help!!!

I basically DUPLICATE my file and it worked! Thanks.

The problem for me was that I had placed a title halfway through the last bit of footage and the rest was just the end of the video. When I shortened the title to end when the footage ended everything exported without a problem.

Utterly ridiculous of course but what can you do...

One thing that worked for me is close iMovie completely, then go into your movie folder and secondary click on iMovie library, click "show package contents", then click on the name of your event folder which is usually a date like "01-01-10" and open that folder, then delete the "render files" folder. When you reopen iMovie and try to share or export, it should work fine... at least for me it did. I'm running on Mavericks and iMovie 10.0.3

I discovered a simple solution if short clips (probably shorter than 1 sec) are causing the error:

1. Starting with your shortest clip, go to Clip Adjustments and adjust Speed to 25% (or whatever percentage that would slow it down to at least 1 sec)

2. Adjust the speed for every clip, keeping the percentage the SAME.

3. Export movie.

4. Import movie back into iMovie and adjust speed back to your original intended speed, e.g. If you had slowed it down to 25% (quarter), now speed it up by 400% (4x).

5. Export movie 🙂

Hope this works for you too!

P.S. I refused to delete the short clips too as it would totally ruin my video! Plus time wasn't on my side when it came to weeding out the problem clips.

"Never let your creativity be limited by the limitations of your tool."

This is a pretty annoying problem. Almost all the clips I had in my 1 minute video i created were less than 5 seconds. I just took a totally different approach to fix this.

I opened this app "Capturer" (if you dont have this, you can use quicktime to record your screen.

1) Open iMovie and go the project that you are trying to export.

2) Open your screen record app - and start recoding

3) In iMovie, in your project preview it on the full screen

4) The video will start automatically, stop it, movie it 00 seconds and take your mouse cursor at the bottom of the screen

5) Wait for few seconds for the cursor and the iMove controls on the screen to disappear.

6) Now hit the space bar and your video will play in full screen without any cursor or controls

7) Once the video is finished playing you can exit and stop video recording.

8) Now your video recording file your entire video

9) Trim the start and the end of the screen record to remove the opening of the video preview and closing the imovie

10) Add the sound effects, since screen record doesnt record sound at high quality

Volia - export your movie and you are set.

Hey all, I found a possibly faster way of troubleshooting. I noticed that every time I tried to share to a file, I got a partially complete file in the target directory. Well, every one of them stopped at the same time, about halfway through. I found that part of the video in my project, noticed there was a transition there that I surmised may be the issue, deleted that transition and was able to render completely.

So just see how far the video is able to complete, then use that as your starting point in your project timeline to sort out which is the offending clip or transition. Re-try the share, and then if it gets farther and stops, you can repeat the process until you've figured out the bugs.

Beats deleting each clip individually and rendering over and over again.

Hope this helps someone!!!