Mysterious background tasks in iMovie make program slow, unusable

Hello,

I'm coming to this party a little late. I'll see if anyone is still here.

I'm trying to help my son with iMovie 10, and he has a very large movie file he created (about 25 minutes), and before I got involved, he tried to "share" the file multiple times. Because, to him, nothing was happening, so he just kept trying it again.

Now, it seems, every one of those attempts needs to complete before the computer and program is freed from this process.

My question: Is there a way to see the "Queue" or abort / stop / delete any of these waiting processes??

Each one is taking many hours to complete.

Thanks!

Jess.

DId You read all the other answers in this discussion ?

You can use Apple Activity Control to see what processes are up and running. BUT turning any of them off might halt and/or even HARM Your Mac (if You are not a very skilled programer working for Apple) - So I would really hesitate.

See my suggestions on howto speed work up - especially Start a New User account - and work from here. If Your Mac has

- much more than 25Gb free space on Boot (start-up) hard disk

- and You got 4 or more Gb of RAM

Then using a New Account will speed things up significantly

Yours Bengt W

Force close I m0vie - alt/cmd/esc and then reopen. If you go to Theatre you will see a clock in the right hand corner. This will show activity. Just leave the computer running until this clock disappears and then you can close iMovie normally.

I read through the answers in this thread, but I don't see the original question answered at all. What is actually happening behind the scene? Is there a way to list what background tasks are in queue or in progress?

My experience with iMovie 10.1.2 on Sierra is as follows:

I completed a movie project, exported it as .mp4 file on disk. I didn't export to Theater nor iCloud (I currently don't want to use any of these features). After everything was completed successfully, I forgot to close the app before going to bed. The next morning when I picked up my MacBook Pro, the fan was making a crazy loud noise and the chassis of the MacBook was hot to touch. From my experience, the fan noise indicates high CPU usage. I opened up the activity monitor and noticed that iMovie was running at 350% CPU usage. I guess the Pro's quad-core CPU can run up to 800% utilization at max. So iMovie was maxing out at least 2 of the four cores. I flipped to my iMovie window. There was NO progress dial on the upper right corner. It was exactly how I left it before I went to bed the night before. (No, I didn't shut down the MacBook, it was plugged in with the AC adaptor). I don't remember starting any operations after my file export was completed successfully. There should not be any tasks running. I tried to quit iMovie, I got a dialog box saying background tasks will not be finished if I quit. I selected Quit anyway and the loud fan noise immediately went away with iMovie.

My biggest peeve is not knowing what these mysterious background tasks were and what I have given up by quitting. They were unimportant enough that iMovie let me quit without finishing them. But they were important enough to crank my CPU all night long at 350% with the risk of igniting my machine with that extreme heat. Will these tasks be restarted in the next session or have I left something in the limbo?

My MacBook Pro still had some juice left under the condition, but from other users on this thread, lesser power MacBook would have been crippled to an unusable state.

It would be nice if there is a command to list what is pending and what is in progress so that I can make an informed choice whether I should let them run to completion or not.