Transitions (and effects) help in Imovie HD 6

[RiotGirl87]

I downloaded Imovie HD from the apple website over a year ago and have been using it without issue until the last few weeks. For some reason my transitions are not working. When I select one of them there is an error "beep" and they will not add to the project. The odd thing is that sometimes none of the transitions will work and sometimes none of them will work except fade in and wash out. Also odd is that sometimes it is only the transitions that won't work and sometimes the effects won't work either. I have searched around the net and found several topics with suggestions. I tried deleting the preferences for imovie and running repair on the disk utilities. Neither of these things worked. I also saw that I should start a new user account and see if imovie worked under that account. I did this and was able to add transitions and effects just fine under that new user account. So I realize the problem is something to do with my home file.

The thing is, anyone have any idea what I can try now? I don't want to have to go under another account every time I want to use Imovie but I don't want to be going through my main account just randomly trashing files hoping it will fix things. Like I said, I already tried deleting the preferences and running the repair on the disk utilities. Any help would be very, very much appreciated.

 

[JediMeister]

When there is a user account-specific issue the two main locations you'll want to look are home/library/preferences and home/library/caches. Also check for items in home/library/quicktime, where you may have some Quicktime plugins that are keeping the application from working correctly. If there are any in there, pull them all to the desktop, restart, and try again. On the test user where everything seems to work, were you using the same footage/pictures?

 

[RiotGirl87]

Thanks for trying to help me out. When I started a new user account to test it, I copied over one of movie clips I'd been editing with on my main account. But the thing is I was using several different projects with multiple clips each and transitions wouldn't work on any of them on the main account. But yes, at least one clip that could not have transitions added to it on the main account could have them added on the test account.

I tried dragging out the quicktime plugins and restarting but that had no effect. As to your other suggestions what should I be looking for in preferences and caches?

 

[JediMeister]

Preferences there will be a file in there named com.apple.iMovieHD6.plist or something similar, and Caches is full of temp files that you can take the whole folder and trash it with no ill effects to the computer. To "refresh" the computer you can either restart or just log out of the problem user account and then back in.

 

[RiotGirl87]

It's been about a month since I posted this thread and I'm still having the same problem. My hard drive went down a couple of weeks ago so I had to take it in and about half of what was on it was wiped out, so I know have about 30 gigs of free space so I know that's not the problem. iMovie HD 6 was also wiped off of my computer so I figured one good result of the hard drive problem is that when I re-downloaded imovie my transition/effects problem would go away. No such luck. Even after re-downloading iMovie it still won't let me use transitions or effects which makes video editing pretty useless. I've tried to delete the preferences, run disk utility, and empty out the imovie caches. Am I supposed to try deleting all the caches? Others I haven't tried? I'm so confused and frustrated. Anyone have any other ideas?

Also, last night I tried to set up another user account and run iMovie that way because last time I could at least do that, however at this point iMovie won't add effects or transitions in either account. I'm at a loss...