imovie HD choppy sound effects playback in Star Wars movie for kids

[eclipse]

Hi,
I'm editing a short movie of the kids I'd love to play for them and cousins on Christmas. Just adding sound effects for light sabres etc, (not doing the whole horrifically time consuming light-sabre glowing visual effect). Anyway, just lining up all the light sabre SOUNDS is taking forever.

i saved the project, and then disaster.

The aiff files play back sounding all choppy and static. Is there some function I need to turn off? I exported the movie before into Quicktime and it seemed to sound OK then... but it's REALLY bad while I'm trying to work on these sound effects and edit and polish up the light sabre swings and hits sound effects. What did I do wrong?

 

[DPA]

Specs?

What are the specs of you machine? It could be that your machine can't play every little bit of the project while it is unrendered and usually the first thing to get cut or quality taken down is the audio. If you have any Intel Mac with 2.16GHz processor or more and 2GB of RAM or more you should be fine and that is probably is not the problem. As long as it works as an exported Quicktime file you're fine, right?

 

[eclipse]

I'm using 10.5.6 but on an old Dual 2 Ghz PowerPC G5.

Light sabre duels use a few tracks of sound. I use the top 'track' to do the swinging of the swords, and the bottom 'track' to do the clashes and contact. It's extremely tricky to line up, and it would be nice if I could listen to it as I edit.

I'm going to check out iMovie 08's audio and see if it has a fit after I add these sound effects.

I wish iMovie 08 had HD's visual effects etc, but maybe they'll bring the best of HD across into iMovie 09? Any rumours out there?

 

[DPA]

iDon't Know

I don't know of any rumors for iLife '09, let alone specifically iMovie '09. I'm sure that you can tell by my name that I'm a Final Cut guy and I don't have as much experience with iMovie as I do with Final Cut Pro. The tip I gave you before is a "general" video/hardware tip. I would call an Apple store or go into one if possible. There should be someone who can help you. You're specs are fine, the same as one of my Macs and there shouldn't be a problem there. Have you tried relaunching iMovie and/or rebooting your Mac?

 

[eclipse]

Yep, done the relaunch shut down reboot thing, and guess what? The sound came back in HD for a while.... then started getting "choppy" again.

I've done all the video editing I think I need in HD, and exported the movie into 08. I'm just watching Lynda.com (which I belong to for learning web and graphic design, and think I'm addicted to now!) to learn 08 audio editing, then I think I'll be OK.

 

[DPA]

That's how I got started. I'm cheap though I like the YouTube video tutorials. If you are done with the video editing portion you can export the video and make a "podcast" in GarageBand for the audio. I'm pretty sure you can put the video track in GarageBand under the make a podcast option. If not You can watch the video in Quicktime and make the audio track in GarageBand. Once you are done in GarageBand you can export the file as an AIFF file and import it to your iMovie project.