Help imovie slow

[vanzskater272]

I just used imovie for the first time and I had some mp4 files that I wanted to edit. So I opened up imovie slected mpeg-4 for the format then imported the clip that I wanted to edit. But when I tried to import the clip it said that it was going to take 127 minutes. Is that normal? The clip is 44 minutes long and I have a c2d macbook with 1gb of ram.

And the fans were loud and did not stop being loud untill I was done importing.

 

[mklos]

Believe it or not, you probably ran out of RAM. Next time you do it, open up Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor) and then click on the System Memory tab and see how much RAM is free. I'm willing to bet you only had around 20MB or less of 1GB. I have 2GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro C2D and I've done things that have made me run out of RAM on this.

What iMovie had to do was convert the MP4 movie file you had into DV format so it could be edited. So it was converting while importing. This is why you ran out of RAM and the fans were very loud. The Dual Core CPU was probably running at nearly 200% (100% x 2 cores). Converting formats uses a ton of CPU and RAM.

 

[vanzskater272]

Believe it or not, you probably ran out of RAM. Next time you do it, open up Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor) and then click on the System Memory tab and see how much RAM is free. I'm willing to bet you only had around 20MB or less of 1GB. I have 2GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro C2D and I've done things that have made me run out of RAM on this.

What iMovie had to do was convert the MP4 movie file you had into DV format so it could be edited. So it was converting while importing. This is why you ran out of RAM and the fans were very loud. The Dual Core CPU was probably running at nearly 200% (100% x 2 cores). Converting formats uses a ton of CPU and RAM.

Yeah I was using activity monitor and it was only using 107% of the cores. But your probably right about the ram.

 

[Xander562]

I agree, get more RAM!!