Lousy iMovie HD 6.0.2 playback -- stuttering video and audio

Hello Adelmo:

Welcome to discussions! 😉

Although Apple Technical Employees rarely read these discussions, there is a way to get your concerns to them.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/imovie.html

Just this week, Len Goff (long-time discussions contributor) accomplished this very feat by telling Apple about an MP3 issue and now there is an Apple fix in the KB Articles because of his feedback.

Don't give up hope-that is whay we all work so long and hard in these discussion groups-and that just adds to Apple's Magic as far as I'm concerned.

:)Sue

Hello Karl,
I tried your suggestion of removing 30 voiceover clips from my problem iMovie. Guess what? You were so correct. The movie played perfectly after I did this - I regained total control over the stop/start action, I was able to drag the playhead along smoothly and the actual movie ran very smoothly. Obviously so many voiceover clips definitely seem to be a major problem.

I don't expect to have to use as many voiceover clips in any future projects as this one was rather unique. It also explains why another small project that was underway prior to me upgrading to iLife 06 was not affected. This project so far is only about 10 minutes and there were no voiceovers whatsoever and at all times it behaved as it should. Thanks for explaining everything Karl in the way you did.

Thank you, Sue!
Yesterday I sent a feedback to that link, hope it will be useful for all of us!
Let's hope together....
Bye!

Well, I finally finished my travel movie with the help of everyone here. The solution was to save the movie to QuickTime and then import it to a new project. I was able to add titles, add music, add transitions and everything I wanted to do except extract audio from the new file. One attempt showed that the extraction would be the complete sound tract from the movie. The other limitation is that the original sound track, extracted sound and added music were now all on the same tract and cannot be adjusted individually. This was a small consession to make.

Again, thanks to all that are adding to the help and XXX to anyone criticizing the people supporting this link. Get a life.

Don

After working on this for several months I believe that Karl has hit on the main source of the problem I was having. I realize that this may not be the final answer for everyone else.

I use a lot of audio extraction, duplicating it to place background over still pictures, etc. I sometimes copy the extractions and use them in several places. When I removed all extracted audio the project ran smoothly. When I returned it the project ran jerky.

I saved it to a QuickTime movie and then opened a new project with it in iMovie where it ran smoothly as one continuous clip. I was able to split the movie into smaller clips so I could add transitions and titles. I found an area where I wanted to extract a small audio clip so I split the video into a small clip and attempted to extract the audio. The extraction time was very long for this small clip so I guess it was extracting the audio from the entire project, even though I had only requested the small part. I stopped the extraction before it finished.

When I build a project I import large clips from my camera and the do editing in the time line and shorten the clips considerably. Therefore when I am extracting audio I am getting much larger files than it appears. When I have lots of extractions, copies and then obviously overlaps that don't appear in the audio time line, the computer is overloaded trying to handle all these at once.

Unless the handling of extractions is changed by Apple for iMovie, my only solution is to reduce the number of audio extractions in my longer projects.

Don

Don, I think you're on the right track.

My experience is, however, that it's not the size of the extracted audio clips or overlapping audio clips that matters. It's the total number of audio clips.

How many audio clips does the project have? To get a count, drag across all the audio clips. iMovie shows the number of selected clips at the bottom of the project window. (Do NOT use iMovie's Select All command to select the audio clips.)

Karl

Hi to everybody!
Totally agree with Karl: the extracted audio clips can be a problem, but the issue starts at a certain number of audio tracks, no matter if they are MP3, AIFFs, WAVs, I tried to convert them in various formats and the result is the same: X number of audio clips=the project start jerking.
I hope that you do the same of me: send a feedback to iMovie. Please, Apple, help us soon!

Karl,
I'm sorry but after I saved to Quicktime movie and imported back to iMovie and fininshed my project, I trashed the original. The final has no extracted audio. Sorry I can't help.
Don

I've finished examining several stuttering projects offered by some of you, and posted a description of what I found, with workarounds. My thanks to all of you who contributed to this effort by sharing your insights.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2597033#2597033

Karl

Farmer,

Please check this thread ( http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2373336#2373336). You will see posts from me about my experience. In particular, see the post with headline "TO EVERYONE EXPERIENCING THIS PROBLEM".

Bottom line for me - after I upgraded to QT 7 (from 6.5.2) I had this problem. I tried every solution I could find on this topic, using QT 7, and found NO relief until I downgraded back to iMovie 5 HD with QT 6.5.2. Note that I have a low-power iMac (G4 700 Mhz). All the suggestions about caches, free disk space, blah, blah, did nothing. After trying everything, I went back to QT 6.5.2 and voila, problem solved and my playback is smooth smooth smooth! This is definitely, in my mind, related to QT 7.

Unfortunately, here is the conundrum: QT 6.5.2 is missing the latest codecs, so now, my iMac won't even play QT movies embedded in Apples own web site! And, I will not upgrade to Tiger, because once I do, I won't be able to get back to QT 6.5.2.

I just stumbled on a post that talks about a CLEAN INSTALL of either QT 7 or iMovie 6 (I don't know which - the post was unclear). But, I have asked for clarification and instructions on how to do this. Might be worth a try.

Hi Ernie,

iMovie 5 worked very well for me on my old G3 under
OS 10.3.9 and QuickTime 6.5.2 - UNTIL I upgraded QT
to version 7. That upgrade introduced the "stutters",
so I quickly downgraded to QT version 6.5.2 using the
re-installer provided by Apple. That fixed the
stuttering problem with iMovie 5.

For what it's worth, my second stuttering problem came out of the blue, on a system which had been running flawlessly: iM4, QTPro7, iLife06 (except for the revert to iM4), and OS 10.3.9. The first instance came when I installed iM6 as part of iLife06. (I was able to re-install iM4 only by backtracking the OS to 10.2.3, and then moving forward again to 10.3.9.)

Karl has done us all a great service by identifying the problem and the listing the work-arounds.

I've decided in the meantime that the smart choice for me is moving on to FCE, which I bought a year ago. BTW I didn't buy iLife06 because I wanted iM6, but because I wanteed to save my .mp2 encodings as disc images (to be handed over to programs better at compressing).

Ernie mentioned:
"I have two athletic carnivals this week. I will take videos at both. this involves having to wait around for some 5 to 6 hours each day to take 60 mimutes of video This will ensure I will get it right !"

I hope these videos projects finished up with a minimum of hassle. It' no fun having to straighten out software problems in the middle of a deadline crunch.

mrbl

PB G4 867MH Mac OS X (10.3.9) External LaCie HD and DVD±RW

Hi there
I often get audio stuttering when exporting to the camera, its because the prefs are set to high quality instead of low. When I set prefs to low, all works 99% okay 🙂
By the way this is on a (G3 400mhz with OS9) and firewire hardive (imovie media stored and being read from) and a firewire Sony camera.
Its works for me and so hope this might help some of you.

G4 400mhz Mac OS 9.2.x

Hi,
I just got involved in this "stuttering" problem myself so I am reading updates on this subject. It really helps !
I love your above reply. Wish I had said it.
Some people are just negative and never have other solutions then to complain. Keep up the good works.
Tom