iMovie: Jerky playback & editing

[merQrial]

Hi guys,

while in imovie, i can't get the edit playback smooth. quality is set to standard, 30fps, the clips (mpeg4) are fine as is the music (aac). even when i export to quicktime: same problem. I have 30gigs available of hard disk, not running other programs, disk warriored my permissions. Any help would be great.

All the best,

Q

 

[Applespider]

How many audio clips do you have? More than 99? If so, iMovie will turn to sludge and be v jerky. Group some together and export them to sound only, then dump the original and reimport your groups so that you have less than 50.

 

[merQrial]

Hi mate,

I have 23 plus 2 still pics.

 

[Applespider]

OK... then what machine are you using? If it's got a slow HD, then the amount of space isn't going to mean much.

RAM and HD speed (if it's only a 4200rpm) then you might need to pick up an external one for editing (and backup!)

 

[merQrial]

Its a 1Ghz G4 Powerbook with 768 SDRAM. I have been using a 5400 rpm external drive to store & work on the projects, but also tried moving the project to the native HD to see if that helped. It didnt.

 

[Applespider]

You might just need more power to do it - or set the edit playback quality to lowest in iMovie and resign yourself to v long export times.

I use an external 7200 hard drive with 1.25GB of RAM to edit on my 1.25Ghz Powerbook and it's OK.

On the few occasions when I tried with 512MB and on the internal, the results weren't good.

 

[merQrial]

thanks so much. still no joy. is there any hidden things on my re-formatted hd that i dont know of?

thanks for your time

 

[TotalForge]

Try creating a short test project in NTSC DV format, and see how it is. MPEG is probably more CPU hungry than DV, you might gain speed by switching formats.