iMovie 11 showing incorrect date/time

The date/time stamp feature apparently worked fine until the 9.0.6 version of iMovie came out. After that it wouldn't display the correct date/time. It would be an hour to several hours off, depending on where your time zone is. One of my Macs has version 9.0.7 on it and it works fine with the stamp. But I upgraded my other Mac to version 9.0.8 (the latest) and the bug is back. That Mac's date/timestamp is off by 5 hours.

Hmmm....the playhead shows a different time than the video AND it is not off by a whole hour but by several hours and minutes. Thus, it would seem weird if it were only a UTC issue. The screen shot below shows the correct time (11:59 am) at the playhead but not in the actual video (4:02 am), which is 7 hours and 57 minutes off (if I have my math correct).

I called Apple about this a couple weeks ago. The guy I talked to hadn't heard about this issue, but then decided to see if his iMovie did it, too. Sure enough, his time stamp was off, too. For us the time stamp was 4 hours ahead of what it was supposed to be. He said he would be filling out a report and sending it to the engineers to try to fix. In the meantime, he suggested going to the "Adjust date/time" feature on the event and changing the event to 4 hours earlier so the "correct" time would be shown in the project. I have been just typing the date and time in manually in a footer on the project because I don't want to mess with my original file since the original file has the correct time.

I have this problem too, using iMovie 9.0.8. My clips are all off by 7 hours, and I live in the Pacific time zone (UTC -8).

WORKAROUND SOLUTION TO APPLE IMOVIE DATE/TIME SHOWING WRONG INFO

I ran into this as well, but here are the workarounds I've found so I can at least use the time/date stamp text feature to display the correct time.

How to add a time and date text overlay to your video

1 - Drag clip into your project

2 - Cick the "T" button to add a text title.

3 - Drag the Text Title called "Date/Time" to the clip that you want to burn a timestamp to.

4 - Preview the clip and write down the time and date iMovie is adding to the video if the info is wrong.

Steps to get Apple iMovie to burn in the CORRECT time and date:

5 - Select the video clip in your project that you added the date/time filter title to and choose, show in event browser (this is a Control+click or right mouse click option).

6 - Under iMovie's File menu choose "Adjust clip date and time..." Please note that you are adjusting the metadata in the original movie inorder to fool iMovie. If this clip is also used outside of iMovie you may want to do this on a copy of the movie.

7 - Enter in the offset from the time displayed to the time and date desired. In most cases you can simply click the hours backward to get to the correct time zone offset.

8 - Scrub the video clip with the Date and Time Text filter and verify that it now shows the desired time.

If you are needing to put in a timestamp with seconds you will probably need to use another video editing tool to burn your timecode in. Apple Motion and Adobe After Effects gives users the ultimate control in adding this meta data along with font choices, colors, etc, but it is probably overkill for most users!

References:

http://commons.trincoll.edu/sta/2012/07/06/adding-a-timestamp-to-your-imovie-fil e/

In my case the problem is, iMovie disregards the setting of the date/time from the camera in case the date/time area in the camera has been set to the destination location. Example: I set the area to Buenos Aires (-4 hrs) and the time in the clips on the camera show OK, but the camera archive in iMovie is showing the original (uncorrected) time, so all clips are 4 hrs off.

Looks like a stupid bug and, honestly, I don't expect an update of iMovie anymore.

So it looks like Apple has released v9.0.9 (aka iMovie 11). I'm still on 9.0.4 to avoid the time stamp problem. Unfortunately there's no mention in the readme of v9.0.9 about fixing the time stamp issue.

It is pretty said that a well working function stops working for some reason and they are not fixing it. Having some experience with software project, I'm assuming the code branch taking care of time zone difference for time stamp was somehow lost during code merge for v9.0.6 (there's no v9.0.6).

Hm, I wonder why v9.0.5 was skipped.

Seriously, Apple, this is sad. I know in your cost/benefit analysis it may seem like fixing this now broken feature isn't worth it, but I expect different from you. You are supposed to be a different kind of company.

Has anyone tried 9.0.9 to see if this bug is still here ?

I keep 9.0.4 until it's fixed.

I'm pretty sure I have the latest update, and the stamp isn't fixed yet. Wish I could go back to the last update where the stamp worked.

Malbrouck wrote:

Has anyone tried 9.0.9 to see if this bug is still here ?

I keep 9.0.4 until it's fixed.

The bug persists in version 9.0.9 unfortunately.

John

I tested it too, John, and I agree that the bug has not been fixed.

This is ridiculous. We reported this bug since 9.0.7. I've been patiently waiting to export my movies for the fix, for well over a year and a half, rather then edit the hundreds of clips to alternative (wrong) time.

I've seen many threads on this issue, we've all reported it, what is it going to take to get them to fix this!?!?

Apple, come on, this is a bad sign.

May 29th, 2013, iMovie 9.0.9 and I'm having the same problem still.

May 30th, 2013, iMovie 9.0.9. and the same problem here. Horrible!

The problem goes back some time. The only version that works fine is 8.0.6

All other versions have the time and date issue. If the time is out it will change the date.

In the Event Library the time is correct and when a Project is created the time is changed.

It would be great if this was fixed ASAP.