iMovie 3.0.1 Users "Upgrading" to 2.1.2

gsfprez writes "It seems that the general consensus is that iMovie 3.0.1 really sucks bad. Compaints range from randomly splitting cuts when importing, audio/video syncing issues, random crashing, and most common - performance issues so bad that capture and playback at full framrate is unattainable - and that's on DP machines. My experience is all this and worse on my previously very useful iBook 800. One can only wonder how galactically awful iMovie 3.0.0 was. Can anyone give a positive report on iMovie 3.0.1?" It looks nice. I just wish I could use it without it crashing.

Comments

Strange

[xinu]

Sorry people that are experiencing problems. My first time running iMovie3 was slightly slower then subsequent uses. Havn't experienced any crashes or bugs yet myself. Been havin a blast with it's new iTunes integration.

not good for slideshows

[Dr. Awktagon]

I played with it a little bit. I wanted to make a slideshow out of some (big) photoshop files, with some pan & zoom, nice transitions, music, etc.

The main problem was that 80% of the PSD files came in wrong.. they were "folded over" as if you shifted the pixels over and they wrapped around. Bizarre.

Also at random times (maybe when an effect was still rendering) it gave me an error message about "unable to convert to JPEG, but was imported anyway" which means it couldn't apply the pan & zoom, but it still showed up in the movie. Bizarre again...

I also couldn't figure out an easy way to turn OFF the pan & zoom and just have a static still image.

Finally, I just exported a plain slideshow from iPhoto and left it at that.

On a related note, I hope Apple takes a look at Photoshop Album for ideas for a future version of iPhoto. Album looks like iPhoto on steroids.

Oh well

[Shishio]

Yeah, so iMovie doesn't recognize my analog-digital firewire bridge with any kind of reliability. It didn't before, and it might not for some time.

In the mean time, Final Cut Express does as much for me as Final Cut Pro, is within my price range, and supports my hardware. iMovie is nice, but it's still a free (as in beer) product coming from a commercial company.

Those buying from Apple because of the good things they've heard about the video editing should really consider shelling out some money for a better video editor. I've been a mac user for 15 or so years, and I know they're often pricey. Paying a little more to get more functionality than iMovie provides should make sense to those who want a decent looking video.

And to those who want a more refined iMovie, go ask for a refund. Really.

positive report

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Can anyone give a positive report on iMovie 3.0.1?

Yes.

First things first: the machine I'm using to run iMovie is a dual-processor 1 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. A faster machine will undoubtedly run it better, while a slower machine will undoubtedly run it less well.

I've used iMovie 3.0.1 to import a fair amount-- about 40 minutes, I think-- of DV footage from files I had on my computer. I don't have a camera myself, so I can't comment on how well or poorly the camera interface works, but I do have lots of DVCPRO footage left over from a previous project. The footage plays back in real time from the timeline with no problems at all.

I have about 5,000 songs in my iTunes library, and the first time I clicked the "audio" button I had to wait about five seconds, maybe ten, for the list of songs to appear. After that, there was no noticeable delay.

The effects and transitions seem to work just fine. I don't think I've tried all of them, but I haven't had one fail or work in an unexpected way yet.

Integration with iPhoto is, in a word, incredible. Just click a picture, set a duration, and poof, there's a clip on the timeline.

Do I have any complaints? Not really. Sure, this is just the free iMovie; it would be nice if it supported multiple video tracks on the timeline or such, but that's what Final Cut Express is for.

So, to summarize, iMovie 3 does not really suck, and no, I have had no problems with it at all.

Factors

[clem.dickey]

According to entries in the Apple support area (and some personal experience): Old (iMovie2) projects are trouble. "Reverse clip" is trouble. 800x600 resolution is simply not possible - real trouble for 800x600 LCD displays.

On the bright side there is probably a non-crashing code path in there somewhere.

On a powerbook 800..

[skinfitz]

I shot a simple video last halloween with my friend's kids (as you do) which I edited in iMovie 2 on my iBook 800.

The major reason I wanted to upgrade to iMovie3 was the audio volume levels so I upgraded once it came out for download (incidentally didn't Jobs say that it would be available on the 25th Jan?)

I loaded in the old project and hit play - unwatchable jerky playback and choppy audio. I actually had to export the movie just to be able to show it to people at a party the other night.

Very disappointing.

Very Positive Experience

[jezzball]

For some reason I've always had trouble with iMovie 2. My Sony TRV-240 would allow maybe 10-15 min of capture, and then there'd be a huge blip where the computer (400 G4, 1.12GB) would just stop recording, and then start again. The transfer between recording intervals also generally lost a few seconds or had the first few seconds of the next interval tacked onto the first one (or vice versa).

As soon as I d/l iMovie 3 I tried to re-import the xmas videos that I had unsuccessful attempts at before.

Ahah! It worked flawlessly! The only problem was that the camera's fully-charged battery died at 40 min (the first time I've gotten far enough for that to be an issue). Plugged it in and got the last 20 minutes, and all are in sync and wonderful.

My only complaint - the widescreen (16:9) mode of the camera is not recognized - the video is still imported as 4:3 and is just squeezed so everyone is tall and narrow. Does anyone know of a way to get iMovie to do 16:9, or must I upgrade to FC{E,P} to get that capability? (It works great with plain-old RCA jacks on my 16:9 TV).

Dan

Re:Fine on Graphite iMac 600

[Erik K. Veland]

iPhoto speed tip: Turn off borders in the appearance preferences. Without shadows, lots of people are noticing a huge boost.

Works great on a DP800 and Canon ZR20

[slughead]

my cheap little camera streamed just fine into iMovie, played fine, edited fine (I made a special effort to use most of the new features including the iTunes crap, even though I really don't care).. Donno what all the fuss is about.. I kind of don't like how it's not full screen anymore.. although I have 2 monitors running at 1280x1024 each so I guess that's why. I just don't see what everyone's talking about.. maybe I should try it on my roommate's 1st gen iMac.. too bad it doesn't have firewire........

Works fine for me

[gerardrj]

I just put iMovie 3 through its paces just to see if your statments were true.
The machine I used is a PowerMac G3/333 (an old Beiege tower).

I imported ~30 minutes of video from my JVC DVM-70 via my OrangeMicro FW/USB card, no problems. Clips were only split where I had paused the recording.
The preview window was choppy during import, but that's happened on every video app I've used.
Playback of clips from the timeline was fine. Clicking on certain interface buttons led to a lot of disk churning and some delays and lessened responsiveness. Inserting a transition or an effect took sime time. The app is certainly useable, and reasonably fast on my system.
In the hour+ that I used iMovie 3 for my tests, there was not one error, and no crashes, quits, hangs or anything unexpected.

I can only imagine that with even a mere 400MHz G4, things would zip along much faster. A newer machine with duals, and around 1GHz should certainly run this app like a champ.

Perhaps you don't have QuickTime 6.1 installed as the installer for iM3 strongly suggests?

Hit or miss

[DebianDog]

I am an Apple help and run the "Unofficial iMovie FAQ". I believe it is either works pretty good or runs like crap. Symptoms seem to vary based on CPU and memory. The most happy group are the dual processor folks. I have a movie here that shows me running top, playing a QT movie and also editing and playing with the new iMovie 3, on top of that there was the overhead of doing a 6 FPS screen capture. So when it is running right, it is fast!!!

I have also received e-mails for 3rd party plug-in manufactures that state:

"Some of the other plug-ins have a problem with screen redraw using NavServices (open/save dialog), but other parts of iMovie have this same problem. Some of the titles have the same centering problem as the Apple plug-ins, so we'll need to see how to address this."

So some folks have "fixed" there system by removing all third party plug-ins.

Some people say that shrinking the window to the smallest it can be "helps" with performance.

Some people have reported that running your Unix cleanups and prebinding "fixes" everything up:

1. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities).
2. Type: sudo sh /etc/daily
3. Press Return.
4. Enter your Admin password when prompted, then press Return.
5. Quit Terminal when the task is complete.
OR
Run Mac Janitor to be sure every is nice and clean
AND
1. Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/).
2. Select the Mac OS X startup disk in the left-hand column.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Click Repair Disk Permissions.
IF ALL ELSE FAILS and your still running slow
-Update Your Prebindings
1. Open up Terminal (Applications/Utilities)
2. Type: sudo update_prebinding -root /
3. Press return
4. Enter your Admin password when prompted, then press Return.
4. Wait... (you will see text-glore scroll by for about 10-20 minutes)
5. Quit Terminal when the task is complete.

I am personally not having any issues other than the following:

o Cannot center titles
o Cannot "always" reverse a clip
o Transitions add a black or white frame
o Timecode date/timestamp defaults to today

With all that being said Apple should have released this as a beta or done a a better job in QA. I have told them so too! I urge everyone to keep on Apple's backs and report all errors to them. They must have expected this in some way because "Report feedback to Apple" is a menu option!


Dan Slagle Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ

Re:Working great but some questions

[Twirlip of the Mists]

the odd thing I have noticed is that quicktime format when compressed to the same level is superior to Mpeg-4. I find this odd. is not quicktime now mpeg-4 under the hood?

Hoo boy. This is going to get a little complicated.

See, there are two issues here: file format, and codec. A file format defines how bytes are arranged on disk to make up a movie file, or whatever. A very simply file format might consist of a 32-bit integer that's the length of the file data, then a whole lot of 32-bit integers that comprise the encoded video data.

A codec is basically an algorithm that takes uncompressed video (and audio) frames and encodes them for storage on disk. Most codecs include a compression algorithm, although it's not technically necessary-- "codec" used to mean "compressor/decompressor," but it's really come to mean "encoder/decdoer," which isn't the same thing.

So in order to have a media file on disk, you have to have two things: a file format, defining how the bytes are laid out, and a codec, defining how one turns uncompressed data into the bytes on disk and back again.

The MPEG forum adopted the QuickTime file format as the standard file format for MPEG-4. Read that sentence carefully: it's not that QuickTime is now MPEG-4; it's just the opposite. From the point of view of the file format, MPEG-4 is QuickTime.

The codec, on the other hand, is an entirely different question. The MPEG-4 standard defines a codec, and you can use that codec to generate MPEG-4 data files. But the MPEG-4 codec is not the only one. There are lots of them. There's Cinepak, H.263, Motion JPEG, and so on. What is widely considered to be the best codec out there for low-bit-rate applications is the Sorensen 3 video codec. But a QuickTime file can be encoded with any codec, including the MPEG-4 codec, and still be called a QuickTime file.

If you took high-resolution data, like DV data, and encoded it into a Sorensen 3 QuickTime file, then compared it to a similarly encoded MPEG-4 file, you would find that the Sorensen 3 file is superior. Both are QuickTime files. Technically, both are in the MPEG-4 file format, although you can't call a file MPEG-4 compliant if it doesn't use the MPEG-4 codec, but since the MPEG-4 format is the QuickTime format, you'd be technically right.

Clear as mud? ;-)

What the heck is this lite weight 156K movie or why is the 4.4MB one so bloated.

If you look closely at the small QuickTime file inside your project directory, you'll see that it's in DVCPRO format. This movie is actually a representation of your project timeline. It's small because it consists largely of pointers to the movie files in your Media folder. The 4.4 MB movie is the rendered, self-contained file that you created when you exported your project.