iMovie is very slow at importing, and everything else

[mahonmeister]

I have used Windows Movie Maker in the past and was very satisfied (heresy!). I am one of those nerds that records stuff I do on my xbox (mainly Halo) and creates movies out of them. I would import large files (~300mb) and do some editing and compress it. iMovie takes a ton longer to do this on my PowerBook G4. Both computers have 512MB RAM so I don't understand the reason for the vast difference. Why is it so slow? Does it do additional things that WMM doesn't?

I did a test to see how iMovie works with a 150MB .mov file I had. I imported it (~20min) and then compressed it to about 20MB (~55min). I don't recall WMM ever taking more then 30min to compress many large files together. Why the big difference?

Also, when it first gives the estimated time left to compress a file it always says "less then a minute" then slowly but steadily increases the time. The file I wrote about above started at "less then a minute" and got up to "56 minutes." Why such a poor initial estimate?

Sorry about being such a complainer. I love my PowerBook.

Edit: Wow. That slipped to the second page pretty dang fast. Will no one help me?

 

[avihappy]

Me Too

I have the same issue. I use iMovie HD on my MBP 2.16ghz. This alone makes me want to go back to Windows Movie Maker!

 

[gekko513]

The time it takes to import and export all depends on the compression methods and quality.

First, what kind of project do you use? A DV project will work fastest. The time it takes to export depends on the settings you choose. Higher quality generally takes longer. If you want it to go as fast as possible, choose Expert Settings on export and play with different settings. I'm guessing Movie to MPEG-4 with video format MPEG-4 Basic will be quite fast, but I'm not sure.