Choppy DV export from iMovie 3 on Pismo

[Kirkman]

Hi guys,

I'm new to DV editing, but my wife just got a Sony HandyCam TRV-280 for Christmas, so we've been using the iMovie 3 that came with Panther on my Pismo.

For the record, the Pismo is 500MHz with 768 megs of ram on OS X 10.3.9. I'm using the latest version of QuickTime, also.

Really short movies seem to export well, but when we try to export longer movies (7+ minutes) to the camera, the resulting video is very choppy and the audio frequently goes several seconds out of sync. It's pretty bad.

I have read in other places that other folks using iMovie 3 had this problem.

So my question is, is there a way to remedy this problem without upgrading iMovie? Or, if upgrading is the only answer, which version of iMovie would be best to switch to? (Does the newest version even run on a 500 mhz g3?)

Thanks for any help you can offer.

--Josh

 

[xsedrinam]

For starters, I'd up to the maximum 1.xxGb of RAM. That might help a little. The 512MB RAM modules are relatively inexpensive for the pismo.

 

[localghost]

(...) I'd up to the maximum 1.xxGb of RAM. (...) .

sorry to tell you this will not work: i've had/have the same problems on my 400mhz pismo with (max.) 1GB RAM + i don't think imovie needs even more memory.

as a matter of fact i can't offer a solution, i just moved to a faster machine (didn't even know there is an issue with imovie version 3.0).

it _might_ help to move the project & media to the internal drive because the firewire performance of the pismo is all but perfect. _might_ be HDD fragmentation as well, AFAIK osx only re-arranges smaller files.

 

[xsedrinam]

The additional RAM is generally a good idea when working with video. Maxing the RAM worked on my pismo 500 which ran both iMovie 3.0.3 and FinalCut Pro 3 without problems. iMovie 3 has been known to have several issues which is why the patches were released for fixes though some issues still remain. Some have reported increased speed help after deleting plist files and clearing out cache files. Good luck.

 

[Kirkman]

Some have reported increased speed help after deleting plist files and clearing out cache files. Good luck.

The issue is not so much the speed. I can edit okay as it is. The problem is exporting. When I export to the camera, the video is choppy (lots of dropped frames, I guess) and the audio goes several seconds out of sync.