After having imported music (from iTunes) into my movie, and seeing the detailed waveform, somehow after that (and a successful iDVD), when I open movies, the audio waveform is just a thick purple bar. I do have "show audio waveforms" open. I can't think what I did to change my nice waveform into this useless purple bar.
This could (repeat could) be due to the DRM copy protection on most downloaded audio tracks from iTunes.
If you burn the audio track in iTunes to a CD and then import it from that CD back into iTunes, save it as an AIFF file and use THAT in iMovie, all should work smoothly.
Yes, I agree about Karl's answer and I had planned to consider it "solved" when I sat down to see what was new. I should have marked it thusly last night. (I've since done that.) Thank you, Karl, for the solution. Now, if someone knows the why...
I did check the format for my hd... "Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"
To expand on some of this, I'm doing the movies on my internal hd, not external (at least not yet). My major two projects are each about 10 minutes (all still, no video). Eventually I'll move to ext. hd where all iTunes live.
I'll report this to Apple. I'm surprised that no one has noticed this problem before. Surely there must be folks doing a "save as" with a file such as I've been doing. However, when I was at the Apple Store (Palo Alto) for the iMovie class (a bit after the fact, but better late than never), no one there seemed to have a quick answer. I didn't have time to hang around after, nor go to the Genius bar.
Karl, you're great! Thanks SO MUCH. I'll keep playing with this file and trying different things, and making notes as to
exactly what I do and what the app does in response. (Sorry, that's the geeky researcher in me from days long ago.)
when I was at the Apple Store (Palo Alto) for the iMovie class (a bit after the fact, but better late than never), no one there seemed to have a quick answer. I didn't have time to hang around after, nor go to the Genius bar.
Wouldn't have mattered.....no one there will know more than Karl!
I go the the PA store all the time; Genius bar folks are pretty knowledgeable and helpful, but Karl ALWAYS knows or researches until he comes up with an answer, and they don't!
In fact, some of them were totally unaware of problems with iLife apps that had been reported here many times, and a 'Genius' told me that he did not read the Discussions, that there were no problems with iLife and that if there were, Apple would not have released iLife! Talk about naive~
.. and a 'Genius' told me that he did not read the Discussions, that there were no problems with iLife and that if there were, Apple would not have released iLife! Talk about naive~..
people fail, but the person, who hired that 'genius' made a huge mistake!
there should be some feedback at apple.com, reg. employees ...
I have the same prob - yet in my instance I was simply only working on getting the sound tracks in the timeline. then just a few pics to get timing right. Suddenly, the wave form just changed into a solid purple line - and as I am timing pictures and video with the song - I
NEED the wave form.
I did not do a 'save as' to copy it over - I just was working in one project.
This happened previously in another movie I was doing - and asked questions on it here (about a year ago) and no, there was no resolution.
I don't recall doing anything 'weird' that would cause this issue to occur, just general editing of the movie.
We probably won't be able to discover what caused the problem for your project, Rory, but at least we now know that doing a Save As will cause the problem.
I believe there's a second workaround that will work, even when the problem occurs "out of the blue" as it did for you. (The first workaround was to copy the Audio Waveforms folder from the original project to the "Saved-As" project.)
But first, I need to mention I was wrong when I said earlier the problem was caused by iMovie failing to copy the ".snp" file from the original project to the Audio Waveforms of the new project. True, it fails to copy the file, but that's not causing this problem.
Rather, the ".wfm" file created for the Saved-As project is far smaller than the original project, about a tenth its size. So I suspect the waveform file itself is flawed.
Here's the workaround: Copy the flawed audio clips in the project, create a new (temporary) project, Paste them into the new project, then Save. Close the flawed project, then drag the Audio Waveforms folder from the temporary project into the flawed project. When the project re-opens, the waveforms should appear normal.
I haven't tested this extensively so I suggest using it only on a (Finder-created) duplicate of the project, not the only copy you have.
thanks for your thoughts, and I'll play with your process to see how it works.
For now since I am simply starting the project, and have only put down the audio tracks, I simply duplicated the movie project, and re-imported the audio (and removed the previous audio).
