iMovie 08 slow startup beachball fix
Short answer: Delete all the cache and thumbnail clips and plist files in your movies/project/folder, and any clips of zero length in your project folders.
Step by Step:
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1) Quit iMovie
2) Go to '[User Name]/Movies/iMovie Events/YOUREVENT/iMovie Thumbnails/'
3) Trash the thumbnail clip(s). Be careful
not to trash the source clip(s) under /YOUREVENT/, but only the thumbnails clip(s) under /YOUREVENT/iMovie Thumbnails/.
4) Clean the subdirectory '[User Name]/Movies/iMovie Events/YOUREVENT/iMovie Thumbnails/iMovie Cache/' by trashing all its content
5) Clean the subdirectory '[User Name]/Movies/iMovie Events/ YOUREVENT/iMovie Cache/' by trashing all its content
6) Check that your energy saver pref settings won't interrupt the disk afer a short while (plan that the creation of thumbnails should occur entirely before your computer goes to sleep)
7) Relaunch iMovie: this will create new thumbnails (according to the length of your footage, that can take some time).
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These excellent steps are not mine, they are from Lukum in the Apple Forum
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5772583.
But I have something else to add. I did all of Lukum's clearly stated steps, and along the way found that iMovie had created 9,605 empty movie clips of zero length, and zero size. Maybe it happened when my camera battery ran out during a transfer. Or when the flaky firewire hub got confused. I'm not sure. But along with deleting the above mentioned files, I also deleted the 9,605 movie clips of zero size.
When I relaunched iMovie 08, it had to take some time (an hour) to rebuild all the clips and thumbnails, but now it opens in a twinkling.
So in this case, it was NOT the 4 gigs of aftermarket memory from OWC, as other forums had suggested. The OWC memory is still in the iMac, and working fine.
