Imovie HD suddenly jumps/skips/freezes after many successful changes

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Level 1

61 points

Imovie HD suddenly jumps/skips/freezes after many successful changes

1.8 GHz G5, OSX 10.3.9, Imovie HD 5.0.2, Qt 7.0.4

I have a one hour video which is almost finished. But, after making many successful changes I suddenly find that any new change will cause the movie to get stuck on one frame, and then jump to another futher down. Sometimes the sound will move correctly, but the picture on my screen does not change. When this happens, the start/stop button on the screen does not respond to commands, and sometimes the pinwheel will appear.
I have corrected the permissions, done the drive repair, done the P/Q P ram clearing function, and Apple had me trash the Imovie Plist and cache to no avail. I had this problem once before with the Imovie that came before Imovie HD and I changed the hard drive at that time, so the drive is ok and I also get the same result when i use the external drive.
This only happens one hour videos with many changes. I have 1.5 Gb of memory. could some of the memory chips be defective? your help will be appreciated.

powermac G5, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Apr 24, 2006 4:35 PM

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Answer 1

Apr 24, 2006 7:53 PM in response to taronger

Hello, taronger,

You have 1.5 GB memory? You mean hard disk space? That is not enough for iMovie to properly operate. You need at least 15-20GB free space.

I see that you are using an external drive as well. It needs a good amount of free space also.

That said, I notice the same jerking, stuttering of iMovie playback whenever I have a lot of transitions or effects, or when my movie exceeds about 1hr 20min. I have found by experience that my burned DVD will be fine. So, I just manually move the playhead to be sure the change took effect, and continue on with making my movie with all its transitions and effects. If I want to use this version to burn to DVD, I create my chapter markers and then save my completed iMovie. I open iDVD, create my project and drop my movie into it. I save it as a disk image, and if that is ok, I know it will burn fine.

Sometimes I want chapter markers right on my transitions, so in that case, or if I want to play the movie through first before creating my DVD, I will save iMovie as a QuickTime Full Quality movie. (You must have enough free space to do this). I then open a new iMovie project and import the quicktime version of my movie. I create my chapter markers and use this movie to drop into iDVD and burn my DVD.
I also use the QT version to share back to my camcorder, as I have found that the jumpy/skipping one will not share smoothly.

If your iMovie looks ok when you manually move the playhead, you might try one of these methods to get a good burned DVD.

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Answer 2

taronger Author

Level 1

61 points

Apr 25, 2006 6:17 AM in response to Beverly Maneatis

Thank you for your reply. The 1.5GB applies only to RAM memory, I have two internal HDs totaling over 300GB of storage, and two enternal HDs totaling 500GB of storage. I try to keep at least 50Gb of free space on the drive where I edit my movies (my current movie requires about 18GB)

I will follow your advice and try to burn a DVD to see if it comes out OK. I was reluctant to do this because that process took me about 1 1/2 hours with the older Imovie. But, It now takes me close to eight hours with Imovie HD.

I suspect my video "stuttering" problem is due to my deleting much of the original sound track (on the upper sound track) and replacing it with music (on the lower track). I think that either Imovie cannot handle such a massive change, or that some of my RAM memory has gone bad and RAM memory is no longer large enough to handle the changes. One Hour movies with few sound track changes work just fine.

I would appreciate hearing from other people who are making extensive soundtrack changes.

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Answer 3

Apr 25, 2006 7:35 AM in response to taronger

I suspect my video "stuttering" problem is due to my
deleting much of the original sound track (on the
upper sound track) and replacing it with music (on
the lower track). I think that either Imovie cannot
handle such a massive change, or that some of my RAM
memory has gone bad and RAM memory is no longer large
enough to handle the changes. One Hour movies with
few sound track changes work just fine.

I think your observations about the audio are right on. I don't know exactly what causes it, but iMovie (or the QuickTime software underlying it?) sometimes messes up handling complex audio.

When using iTunes songs, you might try burning an Audio CD of the songs you want to use in iMovie, then drag the songs direct from the Audio CD to the iMovie timeline. Burning the Audio CD converts the songs to AIFF files which I suspect are much more iMovie-friendly. It unravels the tangle of formats and protection that exist in iTunes.

Karl

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Answer 4

taronger Author

Level 1

61 points

Apr 25, 2006 8:35 AM in response to Karl Petersen

Karl - thank you for your answer - i just came back from a three weeks trip to India and tried to purchase (Amazon.com) some Music from that country on the internet. I found mostly offerings for works by Ravi Shankar, and it was not the kind of local music i wanted. So, back to the internet where i found a site in India with music I liked. I recorded the music on a digital recorder from my computer speakers, then downloaded the digital files to my desktop. I then converted the files to AIFF (using the converter that came with the digital recorder) before importing them to Itunes and finally into Imovie HD. The sound in Imovie is excellent and the process seems to have worked very well. I did check to make sure that the music is stored in 16 bits format, and not the 12 bits format.

Do you think that I still should try the CD route you have outlined?

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Answer 5

Apr 25, 2006 11:19 AM in response to taronger

The sound in Imovie is excellent and the process seems to have worked very well.

I'm confused. Is this the same music that is causing problems?

If you still have the original AIFF files from the digital recorder, then you might try importing them directly to iMovie. Otherwise, yes, I'd try the Audio CD route.

Karl

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Answer 6

taronger Author

Level 1

61 points

Apr 25, 2006 7:05 PM in response to Karl Petersen

A huge thank you to both Beverly and Karl - I followed your advice and burnt the video even though the Imovie HD was at the point where it was unusable on my G5. The disk took 4 1/2 hours to burn, and it plays flawlessly.

The reason I stated that the music was fine is that the first tune I downloaded from itunes was playing just fine. The situation got a little worst every time i downloaded an additional tune from itunes.

I was not aware that i could import music into imovie without going through itunes. I tried it and it worked. I will try this method on my next video.

again thank you for taking the time to help. I was ready to scrap over 40 hours of work until you convinced me otherwise.

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Answer 7

Apr 26, 2006 6:14 PM in response to taronger

Oh, I am so glad it worked for you! Thanks for posting back.
As I said, I get into this problem frequently when my movies contain lots of transitions, effects and are longer. Since I am putting photos and video into my movies, I use a lot of audio clips/songs to fill the space of just photos, and sometimes I put it quietly as background if the video is not particularly something I want to hear. I now look out for the time that iMovie seems to be getting overloaded, and I know to check manually and just keep going 🙂

I discovered just by accident that it would still be fine on DVD. I was, like you, unwilling to give up on my hard work and just tried making a disk image and to my great surprise and relief, it worked!

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Answer 8

rrtechno

Level 1

105 points

Apr 29, 2006 8:11 PM in response to taronger

A similar situation at our school was corrected by dropping Quicktime back down to 6.5.2. Several of our teachers are in a masters program and had this problem while working on their video projects. I searched several forums and found reports of conflicts between iMovie HD and Quicktime 7.0.4 when running OS X 10.3.9. Apple has downloads to downgrade QT to 6.5.2 (It is a 2 step process...7.0.4 to 7.0.1 and then 7.0.1 to 6.5.2). Doing this solved the problem with all the teachers involved in the program. They were all able to finish editing their video without problems.

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