iMovie delay when playing and general lagginess

[skiltrip]

I have a 2010 13" MBP. 2.4GHz. 4GB ram.

When working in iMovie things always seem a little laggy. Like pressing the space bar to play, there is always a delay before it actually starts. And when dragging clips in it's definitely less than smooth. Is this a CPU thin or a RAM thing or neither. Just wondering if I'd see some improvement bumping up to 8GB of RAM or if not, what the problem might be if any.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

I have a 2010 13" MBP. 2.4GHz. 4GB ram.

When working in iMovie things always seem a little laggy. Like pressing the space bar to play, there is always a delay before it actually starts. And when dragging clips in it's definitely less than smooth. Is this a CPU thin or a RAM thing or neither. Just wondering if I'd see some improvement bumping up to 8GB of RAM or if not, what the problem might be if any.

Do you edit SD or HD video, if it is the latter, is it 1080p/i or 720p?
Are the videos properly transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec during import? And how did you import and from what camera or other source?
You can check by going to the ~ / Movies / iMovie folder and opening a clip or three in QuickTime Player (7 or X) and opening the Movie Inspector window (CMD+I) to see what it says under "Format:".

Also do you have the footage on your internal HDD (a no no, due to the OS and iMovie accessing the same resource) or an external HDD (Firewire or USB)?

Have you also taken a look at Activity Monitor during playback and sorted by CPU and also seen the Disk Activity?

 

[skiltrip]

Do you edit SD or HD video, if it is the latter, is it 1080p/i or 720p?
Are the videos properly transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec during import? And how did you import and from what camera or other source?
You can check by going to the ~ / Movies / iMovie folder and opening a clip or three in QuickTime Player (7 or X) and opening the Movie Inspector window (CMD+I) to see what it says under "Format:".

Also do you have the footage on your internal HDD (a no no, due to the OS and iMovie accessing the same resource) or an external HDD (Firewire or USB)?

Have you also taken a look at Activity Monitor during playback and sorted by CPU and also seen the Disk Activity?

99% of my footage is HD video shot on an iPod touch. A few clips here and there are SD from a Sony Handycam. But nothing I've been working with recently has been from the Sony. It's all been from the iPod.

The footage is all on my internal hard drive, which is a 7200rpm drive. I'd think with a consumer grade app like iMovie, certainly you should be able to run projects from your internal drive. iMovie projects don't tend to be hour plus masterpieces. They are usually a few minutes in length (mostly what I'm working on at the moment).

I'll take a look at Activity Monitor next time I'm working in iMovie. What should I be looking for? Just the CPU maxing out and how much RAM is being used?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

The footage is all on my internal hard drive, which is a 7200rpm drive. I'd think with a consumer grade app like iMovie, certainly you should be able to run projects from your internal drive. iMovie projects don't tend to be hour plus masterpieces. They are usually a few minutes in length (mostly what I'm working on at the moment).

It may work, but as it is not recommended to use the same, albeit "fast" HDD for storing and using Mac OS X and storing and using the footage one edits, slow downs might be inevitable.
External storage is cheap.

I'll take a look at Activity Monitor next time I'm working in iMovie. What should I be looking for? Just the CPU maxing out and how much RAM is being used?

CPU and Disk Activity.

What about:

Are the videos properly transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec during import? And how did you import ...?
...
You can check by going to the ~ / Movies / iMovie folder and opening a clip or three in QuickTime Player (7 or X) and opening the Movie Inspector window (CMD+I) to see what it says under "Format:".

...

 

[skiltrip]

After taking a look at activity monitor while I was working in iMovie, I see that's it's my CPU that's being taxed. I have no Page outs on my ram so that's all good. Not much I can do I guess but look forward to the 2011 upgrades and hope I can get a nice step up from the C2D 2.4