iMovie HD and "Parallels Desktop"??

Question

iMovie HD and "Parallels Desktop"??

Hello,

I still like and use iMovie HD (aka: iMovie 6). I learned (the hard way), that upgrading to Yosemite, or anything newer completely disables the use of iMovie HD. Yes, there are "work-arounds" to force my computer to open iMovie HD, but I also had to deal with "Photos" instead of "iPhotos", which doesn't work well with iMovie HD...

So I used my TimeMachine backup and went back to Snow Leopard (OS 10.6.8) and honestly, everything was great again. I have been happily working on my old home videos and photos for over a year now. The problem is that it is very obvious now that I am being "squeezed out". Many websites and apps will no longer work with the older operating system, and in essence, I am being forced to upgrade and lose the access to iMovie HD. I am being told that the newer iMovie program is better, and that I should just "deal with it". Well, I'm sorry, but the newer iMovie program is simply not as good for me. It seems to be designed for people who take short videos on their iPhones and want to post them quickly onto FaceBook or YouTube. I work with much longer videos from my old home movies taken with my video camera and the editing options on iMovie 6 HD are far superior. (I also still use iDVD).

Here's my question:

Can I buy a new iMac (the latest and greatest), keep it updated so that I can stay current with all of the new programs and apps, AND... still have access to my old favorite programs (iMovie HD, iDVD and iPhotos)?

My thought was to set up an alternate "user" and call it iMovie, or something like that. Is it possible to have the primary user running the most current OS for web-browsing, emails, iTunes, etc, But then when I switch to the secondary user ("iMovie"), that the "iMovie" user part of the computer would be running the older OS that is compatible with the older programs that I know and love?

Someone told me about a program called "Parallel Desktop" which sounds like it would accomplish this for me, but I have never heard of it, and honestly, I'm not that computer savvy, so I don't know if it would work for me or not?

Is anyone out there using "Parallel Desktop" to have access to OS 10.6.8 and iMovie HD on a newer computer?

Any helpful suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Lincoln

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Posted on Sep 5, 2016 2:40 PM

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Answer 1

Rich839

Level 8

47,724 points

Sep 5, 2016 3:14 PM in response to Lincoln Nymeyer

Hi, Lincoln,

Both iM6 and iDVD will work on El Capitan (latest operating system). This thread will tell you how to set up iM6 so that it will work.

Running iMovie HD 06 with El Capitan

Best,

Rich

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Answer 2

GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

Sep 6, 2016 2:52 AM in response to Rich839

To answer your question about Parallels Desktop, it (and VMWare Fusion) are programs which allow you run 'virtual machines' running other operating systems that you can access at the same time as using the latest OS X. (I use the latter to run Windows-only apps).

For reasons I don't know, only the server version of OS 10.6.8 can be run, not the ordinary version. In principle this should be able to run any application which ran under 10.6.8. However, by the time you have bought OS 10.6.8 server and Parallels or VMware you will have spent a good proportion of the cost of Final Cut Pro X which is a really good movie editor, hopefully with a long future. Setting up a virtual machine is also quite an involved process so I would definitely not recommend this route. Rich839's suggestion should keep you going with iMovie HD for a while longer though future OS updates will most likely eventually break this option.

Geoff.

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