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iMovie Editing REALLY Slow

M

Mattaut

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 9, 2008
161
0
I have a movie 1 hour 40 mins long where I have been replacing parts of the video with a powerpoint page with the audio from the video on it. Theres somewhere between 100-150 powerpoint pages and theres a cross dissolve eveytime the video goes to powerpoint and another when it goes back to video. Anyway I am almost done, maybe 15 minutes of movie to left to edit and iMovie is working EXTREMELY slow. Like theres a good 5-10 seconds of lag everytime I try to drag a clip or something, and I have to do lots of clip dragging to get each transition in perfect placement. Even just moving the cursor around the video theres at least a few seconds of lag. I went to another shorter project that was about 30 seconds long and it works fine.

PLEASEEE, is there anything I can do so I can work at least at a tolerable speed?
 
iMovie is basically a piece of junk if you need to actually be productive on it. Hate to say it, but it's only a step up from Windows Movie Maker.

If you are using the current iMovie 08, finding the older version and using that will also help (a little).

It can be downloaded here: http://support.apple.com/downloads/iMovie_HD_6
 
Thanks for the input, will an older version of iMovie really work faster? I kinda solved my problem, I found something wrong in the beginning of the movie and thats where all the lag was happening so I copied just the portion that I needed to work on to another project where it worked fine then copied it back to the original. It seems that it was only lagging really bad near the beginning and when I went back to the bottom to continue working it was not so bad. Wonder why this is, might be that iMovie prepares everything after the cursor for playback/editing so if theres a **** ton of edits then it takes a while to load it all or something.
 
It's worth reading

Are you using your work, school or home computer. Is the PowerPoint in a .mov or other video file or are you putting slides as pictures into the project? If you are doing something 100 min long you should be using something other than iMovie to edit it. I'm not saying you have to go out and buy Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio because you don't. You should take different sections of the movie and editing those (maybe a section every 20 mins) that will shorten the project file size and speed you Mac up. I am almost certain that this is your problem if you are working on your home computer. Even Final Cut Pro isn't so fast with a 100 min project, not lagging as much as you are, but slows down. If you follow my "sections" advice, once you are done with all of you sections (we call them sequences in Final Cut World), bring all of them into one project. Import them in order and just drag the sequences into the project (this part may lag on any one of your computers). Export your project as the .mov file and your good to go. Since you only have like 15 min to go, just do the last 15 min or so in a new sequence and use the big sequence that you started with to be your end project.:D
 
Actually, it's not due to iMovie.

1. You don't have enough ram
2. You don't have enough HD space that's continuous
3. You have slow harddrives
 
Consultant said:
Actually, it's not due to iMovie.

1. You don't have enough ram
2. You don't have enough HD space that's continuous
3. You have slow harddrives
Click to expand...

That's what I said and that's only true for his home machine and barley enough resources on his others. Dividing the project up into sequences would help this problem by not having the computer manage the other parts of the project.;)
 
Thanks guys, I have finished editing it and am currently exporting it to a mov file. One problem with copying a section to a different project in iMovie is that you can't copy audio clips that are separate from video so I would have to do a bunch of editing back in the main project, though this is what I did for the problem I had to go back and edit in the beginning of the movie because it was just way too laggy. But for the last 15 minutes of the movie I had to edit I just did it in the main project and there was minimal lag if any(at least compared to how it was near the beginning of the movie).
 
Merry Christmas!

Don't copy and paste, it takes a TON of resources that you don't have to use. Export each sequence as a .mov file and import it into the final sequence. In Final Cut (Express and Pro) you can just drag the sequences into one another. Oh well though. Thank you helping me get out of the "newbie" title and on to the "member" tile! Glad to here that you got the project done and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year (which ever one suits you best)!:D:apple:
 
I had that same problem on my emac. I decided to split up my movie into about 8 different parts. It was only 12 minutes long.:rolleyes:

What you gotta do is compress what you have edited to mp4 or whatever file format, then re-import that file to an iMovie project. That way, all the sounds, music, effects, et cetera will be combined and run smoothly as a single edited block. Emphasis on smoothly. Keep working from there. Bam zoom.

Edit: but you're done anyway. Hey, this is still a useful tip. Heh
 
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