Time Lapse Image Import Fails, Memory Fails, HELP!

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Level 1

11 points

Time Lapse Image Import Fails, Memory Fails, HELP!

Trying to sew thousands of time-lapse images I've taken during Hurricane Sandy into one movie. When I go to import all of the photos into a new project, things move along nicely then slow down about 25% through the import process. It takes about 30 minutes to finish the import, after which I run into a serious problem: Looking through the imported images, 25% of the way down (roughly where the import process slowed down anyways) an image is duplicated, and EVERY OTHER IMAGE after it in the project is identical.For example, if I import 1,000 images, 1-250 were imported fine, then 251-1000 are all identical copies of frame 251... weird, right? And yes, when I go back and inspect the original files, they're all different, perfect and pristine. It's not a thumbnail problem either because when I export the video, playback either stops at that last 'frame', or it plays a few minutes worth of just that frame (i.e. repeating that last frame over and over).

Long story short, it seems to be a memory issue. If I go through the painstaking process of manually importing only a few hundred pictures at a time into their own, unique projects, then export those videos separately, then merge all those videos together.... I can get it to work. Also, importing in small batches is extremely fast, even cumulatively compared to adding the 1,000's together (i.e. importing 100 images takes 10 seconds each time, but importing 1,000 images all at once takes 10-15 minutes).

Here's why I'm ******: I'm on a brand-new 15" Macbook Pro Retina with 16GB RAM, 2.6 GHz quad-core i7 processor and 512GB SSD. NOTHING should be slow about how this machine is performing.

Even when I try to export the video, that action is sometimes met with "Sharing this video requires more memory to be available. Please quit iMovie and try again." And looking at Activity Monitor, iMovie is only take up about 1.3GB of RAM.... I've got 10GB still free, so what the **** is going on?

Is iMovie just a piece of junk when it comes to memory usage and efficiency? Is there a better option for doing time lapse video creation? Help!!!

#angry #frustrated #upset

Thanks!

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 2.6 GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Posted on Oct 31, 2012 8:50 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

QuickTimeKirk

Level 10

125,935 points

Oct 31, 2012 9:56 AM in response to cperdue

QuickTime Player Pro (version 7) can import sequentially named files in many image formats. You can even control the frame rate prior to import. I've made some with up to 65,000 images.

Much faster than iMovie as even a large folder of files takes just seconds.

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Answer 2

cperdue Author

Level 1

11 points

Oct 31, 2012 12:59 PM in response to QuickTimeKirk

Thanks QuickTimeKirk - I've read about that feature but didnt see the older version on my machine, so before going down that path I wanted to see if there were any quick fixes to iMovie.

Any idea if the current version of iMovie runs in 64-bit mode? If not, is there a way to get it running in 64-bit mode? Seems like it's only able to utilize an incredibly small amount of resources and, frankly, it feels like Apple intentionally doesnt fortify iMovie because they want to encourage users to upgrade to Final Cut Pro.

I'll take a look at the Quicktime Player Pro 7 and see if that solves things 🙂

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Answer 3

Oct 31, 2012 1:27 PM in response to cperdue

Since I've never owned a "movie" camera I've relied on QuickTime Player Pro to create my "videos".

iMovie has long been Apple's "consumer" grade verswion of software and it works, for the most part, with most modern camera formats and Apple has improved it to work with them. My old iMac G3 DV (Special Edition) was one of the first to have a version of iMovie but the hardware (out of the box) wasn't enough to capture more than a few minutes of video.

iMovie is a "video" capture, conversion and editing software package and it's really not designed to work with still image formats. It can do wonderful things with video but QuickTime Player Pro, and iPhoto are the best tools for still images.

iPhoto can create some wonderful slide show "movies" with fancy transitions.

But your request to use "image sequence" files brings a new level of issues that iMovie and iPhoto can't easily resolve.

If, you've planned ahead and named your individual files "in sequence", you should have no trouble importing them in QuickTime Player Pro ($30). It's a very powerful editing and creation tool.

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