Pokey-slow iMovie '08?

[jvencius]

Is iMovie '08 normally pokey-slow when generating thumbnails? I have a ~1/2 hour movie I'm importing and it is projecting 240+ minutes to generate thumbnails. That seems rather odd but since I have zero experience with digital video I dont' know what to expect. Is there any way I can speed things up? It's not a very high-quality video so it's not as if I'm trying to win an Oscar with it but I would like to be able to cut out a lot of the junk footage the guy running the camera took. I'd be content to have thumbnails at ~1 minute intervals and I don't know how to set it up that way (FWIW, the "Getting Started with iMovie '08 .pdf wasn't much help).

BTW: I'm on a 2.2 MBP with 2GB RAM.

 

[jvencius]

Now iMovie is saying that it will take 31 minutes to Process New Event and Create Thumbnails for a 5:40 clip. Is this reasonable? If so, why is it taking so long and is there anything I can do to speed things up?

 

[jvencius]

Now it's up to 38 minutes processing time for the same <6 minute clipe.

 

[jvencius]

The processing time is up to 53 minutes now! I have a Safari window with one tab open and iTunes playing in the background, but nearly an hour's processing time for such a short clip seems rather unreasonable to me. If iMovie '08 is indeed this clunky, maybe I'll have to look at Final Cut Express...

 

[jvencius]

WTF?!?!?! It's now saying over an hour's processing time! Something is not right...

 

[Naimfan]

Look at Activity Monitor and see what other processes you have running.

Also, what format are you using for video? If you're converting AVI you're in for a long night.

Bob

 

[TheAnswer]

What format is the original video in?

 

[jvencius]

What format is the original video in?

mpeg-4

 

[jvencius]

Look at Activity Monitor and see what other processes you have running.

Also, what format are you using for video? If you're converting AVI you're in for a long night.

Bob

Nothing showed up with more than 3.5% of CPU usage. iMovie was the most procesor-intensive by far.

 

[jvencius]

Since the clips from my bud's DVD are all ripped into mpeg-4 format, is there a format I should convert them to (or re-rip them to a different format)? I don't particularly care about lossy-ness since the vids aren't all that great of a quality but having iMovie project >1 hour to process/add thumbnails for a 5 minute clip is unacceptable.

 

[Florida Gator]

I'm also having this problem on my 2ghz Macbook with 2gb of ram.

It takes forever to generate thumbnails for most videos. If its a 1 minute clip, it takes 4 minutes of "generating thumbnails." If its a 60 minute clip, it tells me its going to take 300 minute to generate the thumbnails. Is anybody else having this issue?

 

[tenjin]

Hi,

Same here.

MBP 2.6 with the fast drive and 4Gb RAM.

I have a DVD of a TV show (2 hours) I recorded on my consumer DVD recorder. I created an mp4 file using Handbrake, then imported it into iMovie. The import took about 30 seconds, but the "generating thumbnails" estimated 9 hours!!

It essentially maxed out the processor, and I was forced to "force quit" it.

Any ideas?

D.

 

[ccartiermac]

iMovie Generating Thumbnails Takes Too Long

I imported short video clips from a Sony DV that were several minutes long. The thumbnail generation didn't take too long. Sorry I didn't time it.

However, I encountered an issue when I imported a 10 minute segment and instructed iMovie to add it to an existing event instead of creating a new event. The thumbnail generation dialog has now been running for 6 hours on a iMac 4.1 1.83 ghz Intel Core Duo with1.5Gb of memory. CPU utliization is low. iLife is using less than 4% CPU. Disk activity is low - max disk i/o is 40 kB / sec.

There appears to be some bottleneck in the s/w design from what I can see.

Has anyone received an explanation yet from Apple how to fix this issue?

Yes, i am running the latest update.

 

[ccartiermac]

iMovie Generating Thumbnails Takes too Long

Here is a post I put on the Apple support site after a call with support

reviewed this problem with Apple support. after reviewing machine and s/w configs they asked me for the model of my DVR whic is a Sony DCR-TRV30. iMovie recognizes the model but apparently its not on the supported camera list.

Regardless after some coaching from the Apple rep - I tried to forced quit the application but had to power-off the machine since since iMovie would not force quit and I could not get the O/S to shutdown. I re-imported the video affer reboot The generating thumbnails was finsihed in less time than the 7 minute segment I imported.

There seems to be some bug which caused the application hang in a loop which only consumed 3.5% cpu utilization and 22 threads. Virtual memory was about 1GB

iMac 4.1 Core Duo Mac OS X (10.5.2)