iMovie 10.0 Video rendering error: -50?

An update to my previous inability to render video: I was finally able to get my video to render correctly. Whether any of the following steps were necessar or not, I can't be sure, but I can share the steps I took in order to successfully render. I first duplicated the project and started working in the second project, believing that a corrupted still image or video clip was the cause of my render issues. I halved my new project's time and rendered the remaining. That worked fine, so I created another project, and took 3/4 of the whole project this time instead of half, and rendered and found the error. I was able to isolate the clip I thought was causing the error, got a new copy, dropped it back in the timeline, and it rendered fine after that.

This allowed me to keep my progress and share my project.

***Take a backup prior to proceeding***

Go in and remove the Render Files from my project. Find the iMovie Library then right-click and "Show Package Contents." From there locate your project and browse to the "Render Files" folder. I go into the three folders therein and delete all the subconent(folders/files) leaving only the three parent folders. Then open iMovie and allow the Thumbnails, Peak Data and High Quality Media re-render then try to share again.

Movies/iMovie Library/Project/Render Files

I haven't had a chance yet to update to iMovie 10.1 yet. Has anyone else to see if it corrects this issue?

How do you see where the clip is stuck? The little circle goes about a third of the way after a very long delay and then it says that it was unsuccessful. I don't see where it got stuck.

My solution.

Create a new movie.

Press cmd + A to select all edits from broken movie

Pres cmd + V in new movie.

Delete old movie.

Click Share: it worked!

That's what I have been doing to everything in my Updated Projects folder. I can confirm that it worked for all of my projects. The Duplicate option might work as well but I didn't try it.

Scratch that - broke again.

Tried starting from a fresh movie and re-imported footage. Now every export get -50.

Apple, please, sort this out.

Editing MP4 and MTSC 1080p footage - exporting as 720P.

Take original file.

Convert it to *.mov (I do it with the help of Total Video Converter Lite) for example.

I convert my original files two times: *.mov & *.m4v

It’s no importance if your original file have the same extension *.mov, just do it.

Import file to iMovie and make share to film. It’s work fine.

I’ve made my film with 18 footage 34 min duration.

I think it’s something wrong with encoding & re-encoding original files in Mac because

sometimes the same problem take place in iTunes while importing files from desktop.

Encoding & re-encoding original files helps sometime.

Good luck!

There may be more troubleshooting possible if you have more than just one big clip and no edits in the project. This used to work for some people, iMovie 9.x (2011) would have similar failures occuring on different sized projects at different times. Sometimes it was a title or a piece of music that was causing the failure. But the one regression test required was a process I called the "Rule of Halves" where you take 1/2 the project and put it into a new project, take the remaining 1/2 of the project and copy that into a new project and attempt to Share both projects to a File. If 1 of them fails the other one works, you then proceed to cut the failed one in 1/2 again, until you find the offending clip, title or music file that's causign the error. See below:

This solved my questionRe: I movie quits unexpectedly during editing and publishing

One more easy thing to try is to run Disk Utility from the Utilities folder on the Mac, and do a Repair Permissions on your whole hard drive, and see if there's something that might be affecting it from a disk permissons standpoint. Failing that, it's going to be more like a house to house search...

Yes it could be one of those images, possibly a title or a video clip. I don't know if iMovie '09 has the ability to duplicate a project, but that would be the way to start the trouble shooting. In the Project Libary with the project selected, but not opened, see if you have the option to Duplicate the project. Projects don't take up that much room so you can make two duplicates. The idea is with the two duplicates to try and rules out what's messing up.

In Dupe #1, you will delete the first Half of the Project

In Dupe #2, delete the last half of the project.

Quit iMovie, open it up again. Open Dupe #1, and see if it crashes after 5 minutes or can be exported in some fashion. If it crashes, reboot the Mac. Open iMovie and open the Dupe#2 this time. See if this project can be worked with for more than five minutes with multiple changes, exported, etc.

If your project has a corruped bit of media in it, one of the two duplicate files will work as if it were a brand new project made from scratch, the other one should fail utterly. Depending on which one fails, that's the dead give away that there's a file corrupted in that 'half' of the project. This process is called the Rule of Halves and allows you to further narrow the failed section, but doing the same thing with the Duplicate Project that failed....

Duplicate that project itself (that one that's failed) and delete the first half of it, and in the Dupe of that project delete the last half, keep cutting it down in halves until you got an easy to manage few minutes with easily identified clips. It's then just a matter of narrowing it down to the one clip that's causing the whole problem.

Bypassed the problem of video rendering error: -50 by sharing my project as a file (through imovie 10) on my desktop and then adding it to the itunes library through itunes and choosing the movie project on the desktop.

Works like a charm !!!

This is just a comment for Apple. I have tried nearly all of the above workarounds and fixes with no success. The final option for me is to do the halving of the video to try and isolate the corrupted file. I expect this process is going to take another half century to complete for my lengthy (1h 15min) video with many, many clips.

This issue is extremely frustrating and it appears to be a problem with the new database for iMovie. Please fix it! I have spent countless hours editing a video and now I can't convert it to a sharable file format, so it's essentially useless. It sure looks like there are many others in the same boat on this problem, and needless to say it's very disheartening to have spent so much time and effort on something for not. Argh.

I found how to fix this problem. I'm using Mavericks and Imovie 10.0.1.

Go to your "Movie" folder. Secondary click on "iMovie Library", and selected "Show package content". Then go to your Event folder. Search for "Render Files" folder and delete it.

This fixed my problem, hope it does for you. Have a great day!

Thanks, just got mine to Share after pressing Cmd + A and unticked add to Theatre. Only shared to File but its a start.