New 27 iMAC keeps crashing iMovie and freezing videos on YouTube & Quicktime
We just got a new Sept 2013 iMac three days ago, purchased refurbished from the Apple Store online. The whole point of the purchase was to be able to use iMovie to thoroughly edit videos for our YouTube channel, use garage band, lots of internet surfing and video watching etc. We spent the extra dollars to get what we thought was the most improved version of the iMac with all the souped up specs in order to avoid any hassle and headaches from a lack of performance. Here's what we have:
3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
27-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2560-by-1440 resolution
8GB (two 4GB) of 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM
1TB hard drive (We have only used 80 GBs of it so far, so plenty of space left)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
720p Camera & Mic
OS X 10.9
We're feeling a bit duped now as this seems to have turned out to just be a big expensive piece of junk. Here are our problems:
- Firstly, thank goodness that we had our own Logitech HD camera/mic left over from our PC because the "HD camera" built in to the iMac is worse in quality than my old blackberry curve. Grainy, lack luster, mic has sharp and distant sound, really really bad and false advertisement.
- In the middle of using iMovie (iMac came preinstalled with the newest one, i think its 10?), it will stop responding properly or will crash and close, we wont even have any other programs running.
- When opening Quicktime to record a new video, in the middle of a recording or while the recording window is idle, it will start glitching - flashing between live footage and a freeze frame repeatedly. The only way to stop it is to quit out Quicktime and open again and try to record quickly, or in some cases we have to completely restart the iMac, which then still randomly in the middle of a recording or idle window it will continue to flash and glitch. (You can view an example here in the last minute of one of our videos, we tried to make it work and kept the take since we were doing our outro music dance, but it totally ***** when this happens randomly during our content portion and we have to redo recording. http://youtu.be/MAJzaEShJGw?t=4m34s )
- When watching YouTube videos, the computer takes a while to respond to a command, like if we click on a certain part of the video, it will not load it until we press the pause/play button a few times and wait. Also at the beginning of a video it will start glitching and freezing again, similar to how we explained above in the quicktime, but faster.
If you are familiar with what could be the problem or have any advice, PLEASE HELP, we are concerned that after dropping so much money within just 3 days of use, this iMac is not performing flawlessly in the areas that we most needed and want to know if these issues are common and fixable or if its a defect that would require we send this thing back immediately. We did not get apple care and would hate to have wasted money that we really dont have on a glitchy crashing huge piece of junk.
Want to mention a few other pros and cons unrelated to our issues, for those who may be considering buying one too:
PROS:
- The Magic mouse is really great, particularly because of the scrolling and zooming gestures. (Though sometimes i accidentaly swipe in a browser and go back to a previous page losing any information that was input on the page i was originally on, for example, i had to retype this whole apple imac inquiry because i swiped backwards by mistake and the whole form cleared! annoying, wish the horizontal swipe navigated between tabs instead of going through the page view history.)
- When the imovie is not crashing, after watching some tutorials and making a few vids, its a really greatly improved program from the '09 version we used to use. I import and edit videos much faster now, and footage does not freeze or take time to load while im dragging and dropping, it is immediately responsive.
- Love using the Talk to text function (like Siri) by pressing "fn" twice. Use this to write long emails and papers with ease. Would like to see a "Speak" read back option that allows for text to be selected and read back (like Siri on iPad)
CONS:
- The text is SO small everywhere and there is no option to exactly set text size across the whole system, only option given is to set a different resolution which lessens the quality of the screen with pixelation, and some programs give you the option to set custom sized text in their individual preferences.
- Sometimes in both iMovie & Garageband, simple automated functionality will stop working, for example in iMove, when certain screens or images are dragged and dropped to the work area by the activity bar (i dont know what else to call it, the line that rolls across during playback or stays put when pressing spacebar) usually, that screen or image will click into place to align with the activity bar and will highlight the bar yellow to further communicate that alignment before you drop it, but after extended use in a session, that snapping into alignment when adding items stops working. Or sometimes you can drag and drop the ends of a title screen to adjust/trim the clip, but after extended time that too stops responding and does not let the cursor turn into that arrow that allows you to trim or extend, until after many frustrated clicks or a quit and restart.
- When sharing/exporting a video from iMovie, i would recommend unchecking the add to theatre option because it significantly extends the amount of time needed to complete the action and i found out the theatre is just like a video stream of your movies to be shared on icloud for easy access from your other devices (similar to the icloud photostream connected to iPhoto). It takes the time to make the video readily availabe in various sizes on the Mac server for easy access, which means it takes forever for your video to be exported to where you actually want it. This is not something we need and is not worth the wait time. (For example, last ime we left the theatre box checked, the progress status of the video was estimated to be completed in 351 minutes, and then 20 minutes later that somehow inclreased to 385 minutes, then duddenly it was done, so i think this add to theatre option also cause the progress status updates to go berzerk.)
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9)
