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iMovie Slow

T

Tex

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 5, 2003
8
0
Loaded up both iMovie 3 and iPhoto 2. iPhoto 2 no problems..works as advertised, iMovie 3 is now unusable. What I was able to play back in iM2 is not possible in iM3. Very slow, choppy, no sync. Ordered more memory - now I have 640Mb. Still slow - no change. Deleted...ran MacJanitor....repaired permissions...reinstalled....SAME. I have a Dual USB 500Mhz iBook with 640Mb. I don't expect any good rendering, but I do expect the s/w to be able to play my clips. Anyone experiencing this problem. What else can I do? (besides getting a new mac - future purchase!)

Cheers,
Tex
 
How much free hard disk space do you have?

If it is less than 1640 MB you could run into slowdowns.

Do you have any Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Login Items running? If you do, remove them.
 
Got 3+ GB HD remaining. Login items will check, but currently it pretty much a near clean boot.

Tex
 
When was the last time you installed OSX from the ground up? I recently did it and can't believe how much faster it is. I think with each proceding update the system dragged a little more and an little more. I don't know why it just did and a reinstall fixed it.
 
OS X (Jaguar) was re-installed a few weeks ago. Used the Jag CD so I didn't have to load OS 9. I do have about 1200 photos on iPhoto. I will rename the folder and see how iMovie works. I think I see the effect since iMovie does index the iPhoto files.

Cheers,
Tex
Mac User since '01
 
On my Cube it's also verrry slow

I opened a movie that I made with iMovie 2 and it took ages to load!
Once it was loaded it did play, but switching between views and e.g. titles and transitions is very slow.

I like the updated interface and features, but I don't understand why these changes make it that slow!

I do have quite a lot of music in iTunes and photos in iPhoto, so I'll try to remove those, but I think that the integration of the programs isn't really a success if they can't fix this!

I know, they probably just want us to buy a new Mac (I'm still drooling when I see a picture of the new Powerbooks) or to switch to Final Cut Express (which I'm considering anyway), but I need some euro's to be able to do that!
 
Re: On my Cube it's also verrry slow

Originally posted by Belgium
I opened a movie that I made with iMovie 2 and it took ages to load!
Once it was loaded it did play, but switching between views and e.g. titles and transitions is very slow.

I like the updated interface and features, but I don't understand why these changes make it that slow!

I do have quite a lot of music in iTunes and photos in iPhoto, so I'll try to remove those, but I think that the integration of the programs isn't really a success if they can't fix this!

I know, they probably just want us to buy a new Mac (I'm still drooling when I see a picture of the new Powerbooks) or to switch to Final Cut Express (which I'm considering anyway), but I need some euro's to be able to do that!
Click to expand...

I think with the new versin of iPhoto maybe you can designate a film role to iMove. This would keep iMovie from having to load and sort the hundreds and hundreds of photos.

I think the idea behind the new iMovie is that you will have your music and photo library ready (like a pro would) before you enter the final process of creating the film. In this situation you wouldn't have thousands of pics and sound files for iMovie to deal with when you went to open it and edit/create a project.
 
More tests:
Decided to rename iPhoto Library. iTunes files in external drive which is not mounted. Loaded iMovie (albeit it was a bit quicker). Checked the audio and photo and no iTunes or iPhoto available. Ran my 4 minute movie (clips and stills) and movie was still jerky with sound falling off-sync. Definetly unusable.

Checked my login items - all I have is weatherpop, palm transport, and desktop background.

I was truly looking forward to doing some video editing - simple stills and few clips.

I believe I am running a near clean system. Any more suggenstions would be most welcomed.

Tex
 
Originally posted by Tex
More tests:
Decided to rename iPhoto Library. iTunes files in external drive which is not mounted. Loaded iMovie (albeit it was a bit quicker). Checked the audio and photo and no iTunes or iPhoto available. Ran my 4 minute movie (clips and stills) and movie was still jerky with sound falling off-sync. Definetly unusable.

Checked my login items - all I have is weatherpop, palm transport, and desktop background.

I was truly looking forward to doing some video editing - simple stills and few clips.

I believe I am running a near clean system. Any more suggenstions would be most welcomed.

Tex
Click to expand...

Did you say you did a format and reinstall of your system recently? Not that it should help, have you done a permissions repair recently? Do you let your computer stay on over night to do it's nightly tasks if not do you run MacJanitor. I would disable weatherpop. You haven't ever disabled Quartz Extreme for any reason have you? Run Quartz Exteme Check to make sure you have it turned on.
 
Thanks for the help Bandit so far.

A few weeks ago I did a full install of Jaguar (I wanted to remove classic and all the other apps that came with my 500Mhz iBook to free up space). Never knew I could disable Extreme, but I will check it out. I put my notebook to sleep often, but I did run MacJanitor about 2 days ago (Just learned about UNIX maintenance). I also ran repair permissions...deleted iMovie 3 and reinstalled it. I will remove WeatherPop, but IMO that has to be a very low cpu program. I really was looking forward to using iM3. The next thing I plan to do is export to camera (I use the Hollywood DV Bridge) and import new clips to see how iM3 handles newly/fresh imported clips.

Tex
 
There seems to be a slowness isssue w/iMovie 3 that many people are having no matter what system they run. I'm assuming Apple is working on a patch.

Just for future reference it's a good idea to have a seperate drive for you movies and once a drive becomes around 75% full it could start to slow down and performance could degrade.


Lethal
 
Good idea, but what about throughput with a Firewire drive? Since I'm a little over the 75% range I will move my iMovie folder to my external Firewire drive (a Smartdisk Firelite) tonight and see how iM3 responds.

Tex
 
Originally posted by Tex
Good idea, but what about throughput with a Firewire drive? Since I'm a little over the 75% range I will move my iMovie folder to my external Firewire drive (a Smartdisk Firelite) tonight and see how iM3 responds.

Tex
Click to expand...

Different FW enclosures will give you different preformance. The closeting thing to bullet-proof you'll get from a FW enclosure is one using the Oxford 911 chipset.


Lethal
 
Originally posted by LethalWolfe


Different FW enclosures will give you different preformance. The closeting thing to bullet-proof you'll get from a FW enclosure is one using the Oxford 911 chipset.


Lethal
Click to expand...

There are very very few IDE drives that can actually saturate a Firewire bus with sustained throuput. The slowdown is in the extra latency caused by communication between the several different protocols. Don't expect to get the best random access times with any external device.
 
My girlfriend has an iBook 500Mhz (dual-USB) which is particularly slow because of the 66Mhz bus. I've seen others on these boards corroborate this too. I've even tried it alongside the 600Mhz ibook with the 100Mhz bus which is noticeably faster. Quartz Extreme won't work on the 500Mhz model because it only has 8MB of VRAM. I can't seem to get iMovie2 to work properly on this one, let alone iMovie3.

Sorry. :(
 
Originally posted by ELYXR
Quartz Extreme won't work on the 500Mhz model because it only has 8MB of VRAM.
Click to expand...

That isn't totally true all you need to do is enable Quartz Extreme. Use this to do it. I'm not positive it will work with your particular iBook but it's worth a shot. It does specifically mention it will work with 8MB Radeons in some Apple portables.
 
Don't know what is the difference between my machine and other people's machines.. I have tons of photos and music but both iPhoto and iMovie startup and run just fine... and I'm on an FP iMac. Some people with dual 1 GHz PowerMacs were having problems, and they didn't even have that many photos or music... very very odd...




irmongoose
 
Originally posted by irmongoose
Don't know what is the difference between my machine and other people's machines.. I have tons of photos and music but both iPhoto and iMovie startup and run just fine... and I'm on an FP iMac. Some people with dual 1 GHz PowerMacs were having problems, and they didn't even have that many photos or music... very very odd...




irmongoose
Click to expand...

It is very bizarre how random the problem is. I too have had no problems though I racked it up to my Dual/GHz/DDR PowerMac with a gig of ram. Though there are people with the same set up as I and they are having problems.

I still think it has something to do with a system modifier or a hardware driver or something. Here is my recent experience with weird problems. I recently was trying to back up my hard drive so that I could reformat and do a fresh install (Norton had killed my drive). Well no matter what I did I could not get a DVD or CD to burn and finish without a failure. I was using the system, I tried backup, I tried Toast. None of them worked well finally I got smart and started hunting for the problem. I got lucky though and my first guess was it. I had a program in the system menu bar that would let me control iTunes without having to make iTunes visible. Well for somereason it has some sort of control over CD and the such. When I removed it all of a sudden my CD and DVD writes started finishing and verifying the way they should. I did not change anything else, you always diagnose by making one change at a time then trying it so you know exactly what it was.

My feelings are that the people having problems with iMovie have a similar problem yet it's so simple that it is often the last thing they will guess. Please people before you start pissing and moaning about Apple and iMove do some investigating first. There are just as many people out here that don't have the problem as there are of you that do. So obviously the problem isn't necessarily with iMovie.
 
I have noticed its new sluggishness....Im on a dual 800, 768 (is that the right number?) ram, But I do have two 80 gig HDs that are 95 percent full, but ive been running imove stuff off a 120 gig firewire. Just seems slower....Maybe its those fancy transitions in the program...or...I dont know...
 
Gave up! Reinstalled Jaguar and all the latest iapps EXCEPT iMovie 3. I would like to install it in the future but I don't want to lose my iMovie 2. Hopefully there are so new patches that resolve this issue. Based on Apple's min requirements I'd expect my iM3 to perform somewhere near iM2. I do know my limitations (i.e. transitions, effects, etc), but slow playback should not be one (making this upgrade unusable).

Cheers,
Tex
 
Originally posted by Tex
Gave up! Reinstalled Jaguar and all the latest iapps EXCEPT iMovie 3. I would like to install it in the future but I don't want to lose my iMovie 2. Hopefully there are so new patches that resolve this issue. Based on Apple's min requirements I'd expect my iM3 to perform somewhere near iM2. I do know my limitations (i.e. transitions, effects, etc), but slow playback should not be one (making this upgrade unusable).

Cheers,
Tex
Click to expand...

Honestly I still think it has something to do with your setup. I know you just did a reinstall so you should be prepared now making it easy to do another if necessary. With a clean install (completely clean without any of your prefs or anything installed yet) I would try iMovie3 and see if the problem still exists. If it runs fine then add your stuff one by one checking iMovie all the while to determine which one causes the slow down. This would be really helpful to a lot of people. I would do it but I don't have the slow down.
 
I've been doing a lot of research on the various threads about iMovie 3 performance and all I can say is that speed problem appears to be almost entirely random!

As has been mentioned, some people with the same setups experience wildly different speeds. It could of course be down to just the users actual perception of speed, but I'm pretty sure there is some little bug in the deepest recesses of iMovie 3's code that are causing these bizarre problems. I'm also not entirely sure that iPhoto/Tunes library size has as much of an impact as some people believe - yes, on your first launch of iMovie it needs to import everything, but from then on my iMovie 3 has launched pretty quickly, even with changes and additions to my iPhoto/Tunes librarries.

I myself am running iMovie 3 on a 500Mhz iBook - responsiveness of the GUI etc isnt as fast as iMovie 2, but is as fast as I would expect considering the speed of the machine, and it is useable...the real worry is the actual playback of clips, iMovie 3 seems to have a real problem actually playing back projects, especially between transitions.

...lets hope Apple are working on a patch for this...it's no exageration to say that Final Cut (Express and Pro) runs faster on my iBook that iMovie 3, and for a bit of "consumer" software, that is very worrying indeed!

Swinny
--------
Webmaster // www.imovie-user.com
 
Originally posted by MacBandit


Honestly I still think it has something to do with your setup. I know you just did a reinstall so you should be prepared now making it easy to do another if necessary. With a clean install (completely clean without any of your prefs or anything installed yet) I would try iMovie3 and see if the problem still exists. If it runs fine then add your stuff one by one checking iMovie all the while to determine which one causes the slow down. This would be really helpful to a lot of people. I would do it but I don't have the slow down.
Click to expand...


With the wide variety of systems being effected (affected?) by this I think there is some underlying error in the iMovie3 code. Hopefully Apple can release a "speed patch" in a timely manor.


Lethal
 
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