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Eug Wanker · Dec 1, 2003, 09:29 PM

It's still unstable, and now sound cuts out on one of my clips.

It crashes every so often - I save with every edit. eg. Add a transition, then save. Add a sound clip, then save. I have to do this or else I'll lose work.

And now with one short 9 second clip (which is the entire video), shortly after editing the sound then the last 2 seconds will be cut off in the final export. However, the sound works fine during the preview. I even tried starting a new project, and again the same thing happens. An export with the original clip will be fine, but as I start adding sound clips then I get the last bit of sound cut off. WTF? This is very concerning, because I could see a situation where someone has edited 15 minutes of video before they realize the sound is all wonky, because it would preview fine, but the export would be fubar'd.

iMovie 3.0.3 with Panther. TiBook 768 MB.

I haven't done much editing since iMovie 3.0.1 on X.2 until now, but it's pretty clear it's still buggy as hell. It's just faster buggy now.

Does Final Cut Express have any of these issues? Not that I should be forced to buy and learn FCE, since these issues shouldn't exist in iMovie in the first place.

Landos Mustache · Dec 1, 2003, 11:58 PM

Well since you have it already why don't you force yourself to learn FCE as the free option doesn't seem to work for you. If not take a course on it if you are really serious about it.

I know lots of people who use iMovie 2-current and the last word they would ever use for it is "unusable". In fact I have seen lots of great looking videos they have made with such unusable software.

Eug · Dec 2, 2003, 07:36 AM

Originally posted by Landos Mustache:
Well since you have it already why don't you force yourself to learn FCE as the free option doesn't seem to work for you. If not take a course on it if you are really serious about it.

I know lots of people who use iMovie 2-current and the last word they would ever use for it is "unusable". In fact I have seen lots of great looking videos they have made with such unusable software.

Well, I don't own FCE, but I have looked at it. Unlike iMovie, it's not very intuitive so it's not something that'd I'd get into without really spending a fair amount of time learning it. I may take a course though, and if I like it I may get it.

I didn't say in my post iMovie was unusable. I said it was unstable. However, now that you mention it, it's bordering on unusable sometimes. Maybe I just have higher standards for usability than some people, but regular crashing is something that should not be tolerated by anyone.

Anyways, I've been doing more experimentation, and I have no solution for the instability, and checking around it seems that Apple doesn't either yet - others seem to report the same. However, it would seem that the export issue may be a QuickTime one. For editing iMovie --> iDVD, it works fine, but if you use iMovie to export small compressed videos for web use, that's when you run into problems.

If you used reduced sampling and bit rates for the sound output, QT sometimes seems to have problems, if there are extra audio tracks included in addition to the audio track included with the original DV file. However, the problem seems to go away for me anyway if you use full bitrate 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo sound for the export. Fortunately, compression algorithms such as MPEG4 seem to be able to compress down that sound data adequately.

I think it's time for an iMovie 3.1 and/or QuickTime update.

Dale Sorel · Dec 2, 2003, 01:27 PM

I use iMovie a lot for editing out commercials before burning to SVCD. It seems like a fine program, especially if you consider the price

Eug · Dec 2, 2003, 02:42 PM

Originally posted by Dale Sorel:
I use iMovie a lot for editing out commercials before burning to SVCD.

Yeah, for that sort of stuff it's not a problem. It's when you start linking multiple clips with various transitions etc. is when it has problems. I find just deleting segments of the video is not usually an issue.

Rev-O · Dec 3, 2003, 10:20 PM

Dunno... have used iMovie for compiling several home vids of varying lengths (couple of minutes to 15 minutes) composed of multiple clips, and have yet to find it what I would call unstable or unusable. I will admit, that at times it is a bit... flakey... but still a quality program. Found that editing on my iBook with 256 megs, iMovie was flakey and would lose track of transitions and sometimes deleted clips would mysteriously reappear, but this was admittedly quite rare. After bumping up to 640 megs, iMovie has been solid.

Has FCE as well on the G5, but have yet to explore with it much... first impression is that it comes from the nonintuitive side of the tracks... and I'm one of those instant gratification kind of guys.

clarkgoble · Dec 4, 2003, 12:40 PM

While FCE isn't "intuitive" like iMovie, Apple has 5 videos on their web site that explain how to use it. They'll take about 30 minutes to watch total after which the interface will make excellent sense. After watching them I switched and am very happy. I still use iMovie for quick and dirty home movies, but use FCE for everything else. It is far more flexible, has more transition options and ends up being easier once you figure it out for many things. (If you just want simple cropping, adding clips and then a soundtrack then iMovie is still best)

It does sound like perhaps your iMovie install is corrupt though. I've never heard of the problems you are mentioning. Perhaps delete it and its preference files and reinstall?

Eug Wanker · Dec 5, 2003, 08:12 AM

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
While FCE isn't "intuitive" like iMovie, Apple has 5 videos on their web site that explain how to use it. They'll take about 30 minutes to watch total after which the interface will make excellent sense. After watching them I switched and am very happy. I still use iMovie for quick and dirty home movies, but use FCE for everything else. It is far more flexible, has more transition options and ends up being easier once you figure it out for many things. (If you just want simple cropping, adding clips and then a soundtrack then iMovie is still best)

It does sound like perhaps your iMovie install is corrupt though. I've never heard of the problems you are mentioning. Perhaps delete it and its preference files and reinstall?

It happened in 3.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2 (although I didn't use it much), and 3.0.3 now. From what I read around the net, I'm not alone, but I will try reinstalling it.

I will also look into FCE some more. The transitions/effects in iMovie are fairly limiting without spending $$$ for 3rd party ones. Is there a zoom crop in FCE, or is that extra too?