imovie not exporting video to file (error 10004)

I too wasted a day on this heinous iMovie bug. Here's my solution:

1. Select the first clip in the timeline.
2. Use the Select Previous Clip button |< to make sure the playhead is precisely at the start of the first clip. In my case, I noticed the preview showed a black screen when it should show the first exposed frame.
3. Advance forward precisely one time with the > cursor button on your keyboard. In my case, the frame then showed the image I expected.
4. In the Modify menu, select Trim to Playhead.

This apparently removes any subframe and aligns the start of the clip to an actual frame boundary.

Why iMovie can't detect this until failing to export is a question for iMovie's crack engineering staff.

Hi,

Probably good to update to current High Sierra and iMovie 10.1.8. See if that cures it.

Aside from that, I would first try opening iMovie while holding down the Option and Command keys, and selecting to delete preferences in the box that appears.

If the above doesn't cure it, there likely is some corruption in the project. You might try copying your media into a newly created project and see if it shares out.

Failing that, you will need to locate the corruption in the project and remove it. Could be a corrupt font in a title, a transition, a bad frame in a clip, clips with varying frame rates and/or formats, and audio issue, etc. To isolate the problem, try duplicating your project and sharing out half of it. If it shares out O.K, the corruption is in the other half. Duplicate your project again and share out half of the corrupted half. Keep doing this until you have isolated the issue to a manageable range of clips. Then scroll through them frame by frame, using the arrow key on your keyboard, and look for things like flashes, black frames, pixelation, and anything else that looks suspicious. Change fonts in titles. Change transitions. If you find something, delete it and try sharing out again.

Grunt work, I know.

-- Rich

I am using high sierra & latest version of iMovie. Created a 1+hr movie which included 3 clips from my Nest outdoor camera. Got error message when exporting to Theatre. Removed transitions before those clips & was able to export. Didn’t have to modify clips

I wrestled with this for A WHILE. Erasing the beginning of my clip did not work, but eliminating the "Slo-Mo" clip captured on my iPhone did the trick. Disappointing.

Yup, cutting the first small bit of the front worked for me too! I wasn't optimistic since it doesn't make sense, but was happy it worked!

For me also the transitions were the problem. The page turnover transition did not work between some of the clips.

I would recommend to first delete the transitions before doing anything else.

Thanks for your tipp!

After severe attempts I found a workaround that works for me flawlessly, even if it is not so elegant.

In my attempts I get the error every time, no matter of the number of clips that I've on my timeline. For instance, let's assume that I've two files (A and B) on my library, and I want to merge them. I place both on the timeline and I try to export them. The error may appear at the very beginning of the process, or during the transition between A and B. The simple workaround is just to cut/delete the first frames of the A and B clips. Doing so the export process runs smoothly.

In more detail, the issue appears every time you try to render the first frames of any video. If you remove them, the export process runs fine.

Hope this will help!

I have the same error, only imported one clip. Have tried importing other clips in new projects, to no avail.

Am on the latest OS. Problem is iMovie *****. It was simple to use and then it was upgraded to this newer version. Nothing intuitive about it. Also, going to export the file, filing it under "Sharing", what is this, kindergarten?

This render error means there is a problem with one or more clips in your project. First thing to try is to skim slowly through the project looking for any anomalies such as flashes or othr glitches and replace the clip having the issue. If you can not find anything obvious then I would duplicate the project, open the duplicate in the timeline and delete half of the clips. Then try to share. If it works then the problem is in the other half. If it fails then the problem is in the half you have and you can split it and repeat the process until you find the bad clip. Then replace that clip in the original project. Another option to try is to copy your timeline and paste it into a new project just in case the project is corrupted. Hope this helps solve your problem.

I'm having the exact same problem now after updating iMovie and upgrading to High Sierra 😒 Clips that worked well before and I had no problem exporting now encounter this problem. Some look damaged as seen on the image below:

When I remove this part, it exports fine. But this still wasn't a problem before the update and it's frustrating to lose that part of the clip.

Errore di elaborazione video:10004 (iMovie errore 10004: renderVideoFrame non riuscito)

For me, transitions caused that problem after installing the latest update.
After i removed all transitions from the video, everything was ok.

Hope they fix it quickly, i want to be able to use transitions again.

I have the same issue since the update - I can't even export movies I have previously exported - no matter what I do with settings, edits or duration it will not export my files - used to work fine before the update. Help - I use this for work, can't get anything done.

Same for me. Used old videos that worked fine before the update and now I can't do anything. Get this every time no matter what I do:

Video rendering error: 10004 (iMovie error 10004: renderVideoFrame failed)

I've performed a clean install of High Sierra. This evening (Italian time) I will try to export a video that gave me problems to check if this issue is related to the upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra, or if it is related to the App itself...