Imovie 10...CRASH, BOOM, BANG

If you only have 4GB of RAM you are probably running out of memory. Suggest you try restarting your computer and running nothing else but iMovie.

That would be a good idea.

Mine is crashing quite often too. I started one project, and once I put the first clip in the timeline, it froze my MBP. My Mac has plenty of horsepower and RAM, too, so I'm not sure why it's working so poorly.

I have a late 2012 iMac with top of the line CPU and 16GB of ram. My machine is not slow.

However iMovie is terrible. It is slow to start, often will display the incorrect clip - it gets confused - and as of tonight it took a massive dump on my libraries where now has now lost the ability to view the clips within them. Occassionlly it will find a clip and more often it will just hang.

I changed the name of some of my clips and it has caused a catastrophic corruption of my libraries. Now I need to restore from back up. Be careful with iMovie 10. It's a total turd.

Imovie has just totally crashed on me. Can't open it nothing. I have a project to finish with a deadline of today and I can't get it to start up at all. This is just the end of a whole host of imovie problems since updating to Mavericks. Functions not working (fast forward, rotate etc), not being able to select clips. It has been so frustrating and now it looks like I'm not going to able to complete a work project in time. There is no leyway on this deadline. I miss it and I've missed the boat 😟

Ditto. I also have a near new iMac with 16G ram. iMovie 10 is painstakingly slow. Thankfully I have iMovie 9 on my time machine and have deleted 10 and returned to 9. This is NOT a memory issue. If I place my SD card into the machine when I'm running 9, it will load the contents in approx 2 minutes. The same SD card with the SAME content in iMovie 10 ........ over 15 minutes???? Why? Sick of seeing the spinning beach ball. Will not return to 10 until it is usable.

P.S. Don't even try to Date and Time a movie, that's a whole new nightmare!

Ah, I just realized that when I upgraded to iMovie 10, it didn't remove iMovie 9.0.9 from my system. I'll continue to use iMovie 9 until there's an update for iMovie 10, then I'll try it again.

I've been very happy with iMovie 9, as it's quick and powerful for basic video editing.

The latest version of iMovie crashes miserably, all the time, for all kinds of reasons - the whole computer!! I can't use it for more than 10 minutes without having it crash my entire computer. If it weren't so off the curve nuts, I'd be upset - that a mature product, an established business would turn out such a crashy program. Boggles my mind. It's a good thing I still have the old iMovie.

I tried iMovie 10 when it was first issued and it crashed and crashed.

I gave up on it for awhile, hoping for an update, or whatever, then tried it again tonight. It crashed even worse.

I'm as surprised as anyone else posting here that this is not front page news.

All is forgiven. All is forgotten. I reinstalled iMovie 11 and followed the instructions more closely and it all works fine, now.

Followed what instructions? And do you mean you installed iMovie 2011?

"Followed what instructions? And do you mean you installed iMovie 2011?" posted in response to my post.

I uninstalled iMovie 11 in Launchpad by clicking on the little "x." I also carefully threw out a few files from my Movies in my user directory. That was dumb and I think I was just lucky not to have screwed something up.

So, this time, when my new copy of iMove opened for the first time, I let it update my old iMovie files. I checked the "Theater" screen and found that iMovie was creating movies out of one of my old projects. I let that process complete, which took awhile. Then went back to "Library" and started a new project. It all went swimmingly.

My assumption is that I rushed the program first time around, or frustrated it when I didn't let it update my old files. I don't rightly know whether I just flushed some messed up preferences by tossing the old copy of the program, or whether I made it happy by letting it update my old program in its own time. Whatever it was, iMovie 11 is now behaving the way one would expect it too.

I'm confused. When you say iMovie 11 what version is that? The latest, newest version is iMovie 10. What I had previously and what I have now gone back to is iMovie 9.0.9.

I'll admit that while it was working (if you could overlook the removal of core functionality) that iMovie 10 did have some nice features, like the way you can organize content within the libraries and layer multiple tracks together. However not of that was any good if the thing was unstable.

I totally removed Imovie 10 from my system and then Mavericks, so helpfully, auto reinstalled it a day later to upgrade my 9.0.9. I'm refusing to open Imovie 10 at the moment as I don't want it to touch my 9.0.9 content.

Anyway, what is this iMovie 11 version? Does that refer to the year it was released?

My apologies. My explanation was garbled because my mind was fried after several hours of intensive trouble shooting and other highly detailed work at the end of a long day.

I was, of course, talking about the latest version of iMovie, iMovie 10 - the one that came out with Mavericks. I am currently using Mavericks. The confusion over the version number arose for a number of reasons I won't go into. I am sorry for that, I am usually more careful about such things.

I am assuming that iMovie 10, the version in question, is unstable. There is no way it should have caused as much trouble as it did and I wonder why it isn't bigger news. On my 2009 27" iMac with 8 gigs of RAM, the crashes it caused were numerous and absolutely spectacular. I can barely remember having a crash or a hang in the years I have been using this iMac, though there have been a few - a very low number.

Anyway, I deleted iMovie 10 in launchpad and re-installed it. After re-installing it, I did what I think Apple wanted me to do when I launched it - namely, update my iMovie 9 files - which I later deleted.

I did not in anyway rush iMovie 10 during it's unusually long launch time. I also let it do the file update and let it complete exporting a movie, which it decided to do for some reason.

So when it was up and running, I began making a movie - a test - with a voice over, a lot of stills and fades and such. I experienced zero problems. The program functioned as advertised and I was able to perform the usual array of editing functions without a hitch.

But, after such a rough inception, do I want to spend four or five hours creating a video and have iMovie 10 crash in the last few minutes of it and/or somehow hopelessly corrupt the project file? Do I assume it is stable enough to get me through a whole project? I'm still mulling that over.

I mentioned above that my new iMovie 10 crashed on me on Tuesday just as a project was due. I was pulling my hair out that day. I ended up reloading iMovie 09 from my Time Machine and using that.

When I originally updated to Mavericks I let iMovie do everything it wanted to do, updated files etc, however half the functions didn't work from the start. I struggled on and while working with iMovie 10 I tidied up my files, uploaded some new footage. When it crashed on Tuesday it took all that work with it. I can't find any of the files I uploaded or the project I was working on.

I have a Genius Bar appt booked for next week to look into my issues. However, I'm with you in that I don't want to spend time uploading and editing only for it to crash again and take everything with it. Fortunately I hadn't deleted my orginal footage, but at what point will it be safe to do so with iMovie 10 is a good question.