I've never found iMovie to be a particularly stable application (I've used most of the versions of it), and iDVD seems to be no stranger to crashing either. Recently, someone I know was considering switching to a Mac, and he had the opportunity to borrow a Macbook for a weekend. He planned on doing video editing the entire weekend, and if he liked it more than on his PC, he was gonna buy a Mac. He ended up not switching because in his words "iDVD was great - very easy to use, much better than any Windows version. But iMovie kept crashing, and what's worse is I expected it to be automatically saving my work like MS Word does, but it didn't so all my work was lost each time!" Since this sounded much like my iMovie experiences (except that I frequently save my progress, knowing the inevitable crash is coming), I started wondering if a lot of people find these programs unstable (I'm currently trying to get iDVD to make a DVD of a movie I just editing, and iDVD keeps crashing). It's ironic that Apple touts them as strong arguments for switching, yet sometimes they have the opposite effect. I feel that these applications are mature enough now so this shouldn't be an issue. Anyone care to chime in?
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Are iMovie/iDVD reasons to switch?
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I only ever had crashes with the very early versions of iMovie under OS9. Under OSX I've never had it crash on me, although I am running the PowerPC versions which may play a factor.
iDVD has ruined some media occasionally, but even then it's not actually crashed. Just made me rather upset that it's spat out an unusable disc.
iDVD has ruined some media occasionally, but even then it's not actually crashed. Just made me rather upset that it's spat out an unusable disc.
I've only used it occasionally, but yeah, I've had it crash on me.
I only have 1 gig of RAM, so dmaxdmax's comment intrigues me.
I only have 1 gig of RAM, so dmaxdmax's comment intrigues me.
Been using iMovie for over 5 months now and it has not crashed once. I have 2GB of RAM, so maybe there is something to that.
I've had iMovie crash once but that's it, and I have done a LOT of video stuff. I'm on the black Macbook OS 10.4.9. I love iDVD way more than anything Windows XP had (I am a VERY recent Mac convert... like, a month ago). iMovie I mostly like as well, however some features I found easier to use on Windows Movie Maker, like making credits/text. Also my transition effects go funny when I upload to YouTube.
I have used iMovie for about 10 projects in the past 7 months and it's crashed maybe once on me. I'm running with 1GB on an Intel iMac so that kinda on par with a mid-range macbook(and now the low-end as far as RAM). Now I've rarely used iDVD(I prefer DVD Studio Pro for that) so I can't say how that is as far as reliability.
I used iMovie for about a 12 months about a year and a half ago and never had issues- only had 1gig of memory but was an earlier version. I didn't do extremely heavy editing, but some titles, effects etc.
iPhoto used to crash on me a bit too easily, but the last time I used it to generate 6-7 slideshows and exported them for iMovie, it worked fine. I don't know if it was luck, more RAM (0.5 vs. 1.5GB) or the many little upgrades from Apple.
iMovie did crash on me last week and it turned out I have not saved for about an hour, so that was very frustrating. More RAM did not help there. BTW, I am using an iMac CD. RAM did not make much of a difference.
I don't remember iDVD ever crashing or creating unusable DVDs with either amount of RAM. (Much better than my experience with Adobe Premier Pro.)
iMovie did crash on me last week and it turned out I have not saved for about an hour, so that was very frustrating. More RAM did not help there. BTW, I am using an iMac CD. RAM did not make much of a difference.
I don't remember iDVD ever crashing or creating unusable DVDs with either amount of RAM. (Much better than my experience with Adobe Premier Pro.)
Just for the record, I'm using a sawtooth powermac g4, upgraded to a single 1.4 ghz processor, with 1 gb ram. Interesting that increasing ram to 2 gb helped some people, while others had no crashes with 1 gb.
I think Apple just needs to iron out their x86 codebase. I used iMovie and iDVD on my G4 to make a ~15 minute movie for my senior project and had it crash, maybe once on me, if that. I've just played around with iMovie on my Macbook Pro, and it's crashed on me.
Yes, it's totally a reason to switch, but I think Apple's having some... issues.
I know it's not like this, but it really feels like x86 processors are crap compared to PPC, since it's like everything that's x86 these days is crap, both Windows and mac, where as PPC stuff was good, both mac and windows (yes, NT had a PPC version that I heard good things about)
Yes, it's totally a reason to switch, but I think Apple's having some... issues.
I know it's not like this, but it really feels like x86 processors are crap compared to PPC, since it's like everything that's x86 these days is crap, both Windows and mac, where as PPC stuff was good, both mac and windows (yes, NT had a PPC version that I heard good things about)
I've had iMovie crash a couple of times on my MacBook, but I always thought it was because of my 512 MB of RAM.
I used an eMac with 512MB of RAM for iMovie for a film course I took in high school. It wokred flawlessly...albeit slow, but never any crashes.
