iMovie stopped playing any audio in certain event(s) and associated projects

Question

iMovie stopped playing any audio in certain event(s) and associated projects

This one's driving me NUTS.

Something happened and iMovie won't playback the audio of all video clips in a particular event, nor in any projects those clips may be in. Clips in other events PLAYBACK FINE. I have:

1) All software and OSes up to date

2) The audio plays fine usng the Finder Quicklook and Quicktime Player

3) Run UNIX maintenance procedures (using Onyx)

4) Trashed iMovie's prefs

5) Trashed the event in iMovie, then pulled the movie clips alone (no other event sub-folders) out of the trash via the Finder and reimported

6) Tried on three different Macs (the event is on an external drive), two with mountain Lion, one with Lion.

7) Googled it. No luck.

Somebody PLEASE help! TIA!

Posted on Mar 1, 2013 10:13 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 1, 2013 10:38 PM in response to CanuckComposer

UPDATE: I tried creating a new event on the same drive and moving one clip to it. BOOM. the audio's back -- both in the old and new event. I then moved the one clip back to the old event and BOOM; audio gone. I then simply renamed the event and BOOM...audio back.

What the...?

I hope it bloody well stays that way.

UPDATE 2: So, I just deleted that new test event, now that renaming the old event seemed to work...BOOM! Audio gone. Rename the existing event AGAIN. BOOM; audio back. This is stupid.

Now, the one thing that iMovie apparently is doing after a rename is "optmizing movies". How is this impacting the audio playback?!

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Answer 2

Mar 2, 2013 7:29 AM in response to CanuckComposer

In case anyone's reading this thread, good morning.

So this bug appeared again when I booted iMovie this morning. No audio from the events. Then, I renamed the event and the sound came back.

Then, I connected another external drive with events on it. iMovie scanned it. I checked a clip from my problem event on the other drive...no sound. I renamed the event. Sound back.

And by the way, this other external drive had events imported way back in May 2010 that stopped working, suffering the same thing -- though, I didn't know why until now. I assumed something changed in iMovie with regards to codec handling and I'd have to transcode a bunch of video. But just now I tried renaming the event with the silenced videos and -- you guessed it -- the sound came back. NOW, with this trick in mind I Googled "rename event" along with iMovie no audio (or whatever my string was) and got this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2630046?start=15&tstart=0

What's very frustrating here is that this is an old bug, can appear catostrophic to the user and I didn't find that previous thread with this answer until I stumbled upon the solution myself and changed my Google search string.

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Answer 3

Aug 6, 2013 3:48 AM in response to CanuckComposer

I have been suffering from the dropped audio in iMovie (but files are fine in finder) problem for a LONG time. I just tried your suggestion - renaming the event - and BOOM the problem is so far fixed. Hope that whatever bug is out there will not rear its head in my projects again. Thank you thank you for posting this tip!

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Answer 4

Aug 9, 2013 2:58 AM in response to CanuckComposer

SO now each time I start iMovie I need to rename the event folder if I want to have audio. Any idea how I can resolve whatever the problem is, so that the folder does not need to be renamed each time?

It goes something like this.

Start iMovie

"Optimizing Video Processing Event: 2011 clips" (<- or whatever I had last named the event

hangs there for a min or two

Skim the clips and there is no sound.

Rename the event

Beachball then "Processing Event: 2011 snips" (<- or something like that)

Kapow everything is fine again

...Until the next time I start iMovie.

Any idea how to resolve?

A clue for me is that all of my clips are dated 2011, but for some reason the event folder, which is sorted by year, shows up in 2010.

Thanks

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