iMovie issue

Is it just appearing to lose quality within iMovie while you are working on your computer? Have you tried actually exporting from iMovie to iDVD then burning a DVD and then checking said DVD on a different player?

I use the same process very often (Keynote >> iMovie) and have no probs at all.

Here's another iMovie question so we don't have to start up another thread.

I shoot in High Definition and don't have FCP yet to play with. iMovie is just fine for what I'm shooting anyway. The shoot lasted several different days and I imported each days footage into iMovie the day of the shoot and then took out the individual clips I liked and trashed the project to save hard drive space.

When the shoot finished I took all of those clips and made one iMovie project and imported all of the clips. I worked for several hours on the cuts and score but hadn't gotten to the narration yet. I save the project and shut down my MBP for the night. I boot it up the next morning and my project didn't save! I saved the damn thing through every change I made. And yet most of the clips were missing and the transitions were gone as well. I was furious! How is it that I can save a project and it didn't actually save it as I left it?

I'm nervous about using iMovie again for extensive projects because I'm afraid that it's going to lose all of my work because it's not really going to save when it says it is saving. Has anyone else had this issue? I'm guessing not because I haven't seen it on this forum. I have no idea what could cause iMovie to not save when I tell it to, but that's precisely what happened.

Thoughts and ideas are welcomed.

iMovie seems more for the vaction shooter. Usually when my project gets more and more complex, it gets less and less responsive to the point it doesn't even operate any more. Frustrating i know. But for your project, it would seem that Final Cut Express HD would be your answer. FCP too, but thats like...more expensive .

If you are a student, you can get Final Cut Expreess HD for 200 dollars (CDN).

Can't say I've had the same experience... I make projects over several days, using various cams and have never had a problem. A different project that I worked on that included tons of short animations and other odds and ends I broke the entire project into several chunks, worked on them as such and then assembled them all in another movie. That way I still had copies of all the parts (not including my normal backups) just in case things went crazy or I made a mistake. Having 2 500GB HDs internally helps with all of this!

FC Expreess might be better for you, but amazing things can be done with iMovie.

Totally. Amazing things can be done with iMovie.

But i think the problem has been for me and other people are the V.O.s. (ala Arrested Development). Usually when the V.O.s start to get heavy and lots of them start to appear, the progam begins to freeze up.

Although, without V.O.s its runs just fine.

My iMovie work was done on a new 2.16 GHz MBP with 2GB RAM and the 100GB Hard Drive. I'm sure iMovie would have been more responsive on a desktop where I didn't have to worry about turning it off. With being at different locations, it's simply not practical to keep the laptop on while going to other locations to film. I'll try and break down what I did into more detail so you all can get a better picture of what happened. I really can not afford to have this sort of thing happen again.

The first day of shooting was about 32 minutes of HD footage. My 100GB hard drive was maxed out. I had to move everything to an external. I command-clicked on the project file to reveal contents. I went to the originals folder and sent the original clips to the external. Repeat this over several days.

When it came to the final mixing of the footage in iMovie, everything worked fine. The import of those clips into a new project went fine, the transitions worked fine, it seemed like it was going to be a breeze. Once again, I saved after every change and transition. I've lost important data before, I wasn't going to let it happen again.

I had to shut down to move locations. When I started it up again, my iMovie project wasn't saved as I had left it. Most of the clips had been moved to the trash in iMovie and a screen popped up asking if I'd like to recover them. I said yes, and they put all of the clips back in the clip area, but not down in the timeline like they were. This destroyed my project. I put everything back like it was (A full day of productivity) and saved once again every step of the way. The next day, the same thing happened again.

If it happens again I'll do screen shots for you all to see. I'm on a month-long shoot in the US in August so I'll have plenty of opportunities for this problem to resurface. I would rather it never happen again though.

I had this issue a while back though I wasn't using imovie. I wanted to do a multimedia presentation that mostly used animated graphics and I looked for a delivery/editing codec. I was going to use the same codec for both because the delivery was on a big screen so I wanted to make sure I lost no quality. I expected DV to be ok but when I converted into it, it looked horrible - all blocky. Nothing I tried worked.

I only got two codecs to give me acceptable output - animation and Pixlet - and they are lossless so I kind of expect them to be good. But I was very disappointed that DV gave such horrible output.

I'm pretty sure that when I exported from Final Cut straight to DVD via Compressor, the DVD came out ok though. You could try converting to DV via Quicktime Pro as it has some other options in there.


This happened to me today. I had an open and previously saved movie project and was importing loads of stuff before I realized it was NTSC where it should have been PAL. So, I decided to choose new project where it asked me if I wanted to stop the import and I said yes. Now there were some clips already in the clip panel and some things in the timeline so I assumed it would just stop importing the new clips and close the project.

Imovie actually crashed at this point. When I opened imovie again, it opened the NTSC project again but instead of showing the clips that had been imported and the timeline, it did exactly as you describe, everything had been trashed and it asked to recover them but it just put them back into the clip panel. Fortunately it was just a test project but I'd stick to Final Cut for anything serious.