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Level 1

11 points

Images/stills turn black in iMovie since El Capitan upgrade

Dear all,

Since I've upgraded to El Capitan, I'm having issues with images/stills in iMovie. While they do show up correctly as thumbnails in the project overview, they can't be previewed or rendered, turning up completely black instead. Audio/text overlays are all OK, the images are just black, all of them.

I've tried various image format (PNG, JPG, TIFF). I've also tried renaming images to some unique name (as suggested somewhere).

Older iMovie projects which I made before El Capitan, that used to be OK, now have the same problem. I can't include any stills.

The issue also occurs when creating a freeze frame ("Add Freeze Frame"): the freeze frame also becomes black when previewing / exporting.

My platforms:

OS X: El Capitan 10.11

iMovie: 8.0.6. (821)

Any help would be appreciated!

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11), iMovie 8.0.6

Posted on Oct 9, 2015 3:04 AM

139 replies

jshire

Level 1

25 points

Sep 18, 2016 2:55 PM in response to GeeD

thanks Geoff - but unfortunately not. here in the UK if you have imovie 09 the only update option is imovie 10.1.2 & it costs £10.99 for everyone.

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

Sep 18, 2016 3:15 PM in response to jshire

You are correct because iMovie '09 was part of iLife '09 and is actually version 8. Free update to version 10 is only available from iMovie version 9 which was part of Llife '11. Very confusing I know.

The problem is due to major updating and improvements to the low-level software - my criticism of Apple is not publicising that iMovie 8 & 9 are incompatible with El Capitan. Many people would not have updated their OS if they had known about this before updating.

It is a good idea to make a bootable clone of the current system on an external drive before any OS update so that one can easily revert in case of unforeseen problems (using for example Superduper or CCcloner applications).

Geoff.

Nov 4, 2016 7:49 PM in response to joslin

This worked for me, thanks.

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

May 1, 2017 2:06 AM in response to zusew

This thread is about a problem in iMovie, not the camera. The picture files are fine.

Geoff.

Images/stills turn black in iMovie since El Capitan upgrade