beachball in imovie '08

[john2006wright]

Hi I was wondering if you can tell me why I'm constantly getting the beachball while I'm trying to edit some video footage. I'm using a 2.0Ghz C2D MB 1Gb RAM. The footage is approx 60mins in length. Whenever I try add effects, or edit effects added in, I get the beachball for 5-10 secs. It's really frustrating. I have no other applications running.

Hope you can help,
john

p.s. This is my first attempt at video editing so I'm learning as I go.

 

[Brendon Bauer]

I've noticed that when I use .avi movies (little clips straight from my digital camera) iMovie '08 runs perfectly fine. However, before I tried using .avi's I thought I'd be doing my computer a favor by converting them to a quicktime format via quicktime pro. When I converted them to .mp4 (I think) I was getting beach balls all over the place, just by "scrolling" through the movie. It was terribly frustrating. I got rid of everything and tried the original .avi's and it worked fine! I think iMovie just doesn't play very nice with certain movie formats. I wish I could see some documentation on what works best with iMovie '08 so that I could make sure all my footage is in those formats.

Not sure if this helps, but thought I'd let you know.

 

[zioxide]

1Gb RAM

thats why. get more

 

[FF_productions]

Maybe you need to update iMovie 08 if you haven't done it yet.

You are working with a 60 minute clip, so iMovie is probably trashing the hard drive and other technical crap that won't help the situation.

 

[john2006wright]

I'm running the latest updates. Are their any settings I can tweak to reduce the beachballing (other than buying more RAM)? Is their any way of trashing the original video footage that I've taken clips from, would that help?

Thanks
john