iMovie not working

Question

Level 1

55 points

iMovie not working

I recently "upgraded" to iMovie HD and now the only thing that does work is the importing of footage from the Canon digital camera.
Titles and transitions no longer can be added. One helpful user suggested that I needed 20 gigs free to have this application work.

I cleaned out the machine and have 45 gigs available and I will now have to force quit this application and use something else that will work.

Too bad, too, as I was liking iMovie before the "upgrade" made it unuseable.
Any suggestions to get this program back to working?

Thanks

iMacs/ eMacs, Mac OS X (10.4.8), 512 ram

Posted on Nov 19, 2006 5:06 PM

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Answer 1

catspaw

Level 5

4,344 points

Nov 19, 2006 6:36 PM in response to Thos Myers

Hi Thos - first off, note that iMovie HD does work well for most people - so it is not inherently 'unuseable'🙂
So we need to find what is causing your specific problem.
What is actually happpening when you try to add a transition?
By needing to 'force-quit' are you also saying that iMovie has frozen and cannot be quit as normal?
I assume you are working from an internal drive?
Try repairing Permissions - Disk Utility.
Also delete these files:
com.apple.imovie.plist, and com.apple.imovie3.plist (found in Users>Library>Preferences). iMovie will re-create these.
Are you using any third-party plugins that could be causing problems?
Get back to us.

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Answer 2

Thos Myers Author

Level 1

55 points

Nov 19, 2006 8:17 PM in response to catspaw

Ok, the following:
eMac 60 gig hard drive
512 mgs RAM
All work being done on the internal hard drive.
I did update to 6.03
fade in and fade out transitions work. I haven't tried others.
I can cut video and delete sections.
Titles freeze iMovie - the spinning wheel goes on and on.
Force quit labels iMovie as not responding.

As a note: iMovie 4.0 (pre-HD) worked extremely well with none of these problems. I have had training in Premiere and Photoshop and have extensively used iMovie 4 and then the "upgrade" came along and freezes the program.

Thanks

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Answer 3

catspaw

Level 5

4,344 points

Nov 19, 2006 8:30 PM in response to Thos Myers

Hi Thos - there may be something here to help:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2358108&#2358108

Have you deleted the files and repaired Permissions as I suggested?

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Answer 4

Thos Myers Author

Level 1

55 points

Nov 19, 2006 8:40 PM in response to catspaw

Permissions have been deleted and disk utility has been run.

And Hallelujah, it is working.

Thanks to all of you who have helped resolved issues about machines.

I love to use the tool - and sometimes I would prefer not to have to work on the tool!

Thos Myers
http://www.taosdailyweekly.com
living in the digital world with an analog brain.

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Answer 5

catspaw

Level 5

4,344 points

Nov 19, 2006 8:51 PM in response to Thos Myers

Ah! Thanks for telling us the result. Pleased to be of help. Feel free to mark this topic as 'Solved'.
By the way - hope you didn't actually do what you said ( Permissions have been deleted)!

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Answer 6

Thos Myers Author

Level 1

55 points

Nov 19, 2006 8:52 PM in response to catspaw

But first, back to yesterday!
I filmed a small protest here in town (about 18 minutes) and then came home and spent 4 hours deleting files and applications to make room for iMovie and 20 gigs of free space. Not successful.

Then I was in another discussion group and an application called WhatSize (www.id-design.com/software/whatsize) was recommended for finding and deleting large files which are archived in the machine.
The 34.5 gig .mov from an earlier project was found and I deleted that and away we went.
Now that updates have been installed and prefeences deleted and disk utility run, it all is working.

Thanks again and yes, this discussion and your help have resolved this problem.

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Answer 7

+jesse

Level 1

0 points

Dec 3, 2006 12:58 PM in response to catspaw

Hello Catspaw 🙂
Hope u r Exxxcellent!

I am having a similar problem to Thos.
I upgraded from imovie 4
to imovie HD (ilife '06)
on a powermac g4 dual 1.42 with 2GB RAM
running os x 10.3.9

I have two issues.

1. imovie HD seems to work fine on some very small projects it upgraded - but on the large (and important 🙂 project, it will work for approximately 4seconds (it will play clips if you click play very quickly after it opens - but only for 4seconds) - then this project locks up imovie HD - endless spinning rainbow wheel - no matter how long i leave it to see if it will work.

I have done the following:

a. repaired permissions on the boot disk
b. upgraded by cloning the boot disk to a 200GB SATA Boot, leaving me over 80GB of free space
c. run fsck -y and repaired permissions on the SATA Boot disk.

Unfortunately, I am getting the same results.

Issue #2:
The colors in imovie HD appear washed-out and purplish, as tho the briteness/contrast and exposure are off.
These colors, in the same projects/same footage, were beautiful in imovie 4.

(All other elements of ilife '06, including garageband and the beautiful Symphony jampack instruments, appear to be working perfectly! I had some similar issues upgrading imovie when I upgraded to ilife '04 - but I can't remember how I fixed them...!)

Can you help me?

Thanks & God Bless ya'! 🙂
+jesse

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Answer 8

Thos Myers Author

Level 1

55 points

Dec 3, 2006 2:40 PM in response to catspaw

Preferences were dumped, not permissions.
iMovie continues to work.

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Answer 9

Thos Myers Author

Level 1

55 points

Dec 3, 2006 2:54 PM in response to +jesse

Updates for iMovie are available at
http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/

Updating may help solve the problems.
You may also want to do a system update as well.

Good luck!

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