# iMovie trouble



## aaike (Aug 8, 2003)

I have a movie of 1h30 that I made in iMovie 2 (without trouble except some slownes when scrolling throug the fragments) om my 800 mhz tower. Right now I have a powerbook with a DVD burner, and yes, I want to burn the movie to a DVD.  I connected my towers' HD using a firewire and restarting in 'target' mode. I open the movie in iMovie 3.0.3 (which works), but then starts the trouble... If I try to export the movie to iDVD it takes forever (more than an hour now). I have no idea if this is normal, if iMovie is still really doing st...

Someone any advice?


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## brianleahy (Aug 8, 2003)

Yeah, that *is* about normal, especially for a 1:30 movie.

The DV data has to be converted to MPEG2 data, and that's very 
time consuming.  If you open the 'Customize' drawer and look at the last tab (sorry, don't remember the name of the tab) you can watch the progress of this conversion.

Plus, when burning DVD videos, the superdrive's burn speed is close to just 1x.    So yeah, expect it to take a while.

Also, if you have a screen saver or (especially) Seti@Home enabled, I recommend you turn them off for the duration.  Any interruption during the actual burning can result in a dead DVD.


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## aaike (Aug 8, 2003)

The thing is that I only see a 'beachball of terror' I am not able to select any tabs or st. 

Thet tab you mention is that in iDVD or in iMovie (the first one isn't active btw.)

I also restarted before doing this and turned unnecesary stuff (like Konfabulator) off...


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## brianleahy (Aug 8, 2003)

The tab is in iDVD.    First click the "customize" icon in the iDVD window to open the drawer, then look for the tab.

My bad though -- I should have explained one other thing:

As soon as you import an iMovie into iDVD, the MPEG conversion begins in the background.   *BEFORE* you click "Burn" you can select the tab I mentioned and view the progress of the background conversion.   However, once you click "Burn", you can't open the drawer OR change tabs until the burn is complete.  

IF you click "burn" before the background conversion is complete, iDVD will just add the time required to finish the conversion to the total time required for the burn.

If the 'status' of your burn operation is anything other than 'Multiplexing and Burning', then iDVD has not yet begun to write to the disc, and you could (if you wanted) cancel the burn without wasting a blank DVD-R.


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## aaike (Aug 11, 2003)

There seems to be no way to make it work. I think I really tried everything,... iMovie 3 constantly hanged when trying to save, export, create an iDVD project,... even after an night of spinning beachball nothing seems to have happened. Since everything seemed to work fine in iMovie 2, my question is: 
Where and how can I get iMovie 2 back on my computer ??
Is there a way to get it from the Jaguar installation disks?


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## Arden (Aug 11, 2003)

I can send you iMovie 2 if you need it.

Do you have enough disk space on the PB to transfer the movie over before trying to burn it?  Try transferring the movie to the Book and then burning it, if you have the space.


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## aaike (Aug 12, 2003)

Arden, I would verry much appreciate if you could do that, altough I am concerned if you can sent it through e-mail...

Yes I already transferred the movie to my powerbook, but it didn't help...


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## Arden (Aug 12, 2003)

No, no, message me your street address and I'll send you a CD.  iMovie 2 is something like 65 MB, my mail box isn't that big.


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## aaike (Aug 12, 2003)

Maybe we can do st. with ssh or IM, are you on iChat?

I mean, I'm in Europe so sending through regular mail will take some time and will probably cost you ;-)


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## Arden (Aug 12, 2003)

I meant private message me, here.

I'm on AIM, not iChat because I'm not on OS X, but I usually don't get on.  The cost of S&H is not too bad; according to USPS.gov, it would only be a few dollars to go the cheap route, depending on how much a CD in a jewel case ends up weighing.


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## Markim (Sep 24, 2003)

It looks like I am having the same problem. My situation is as follows:
iMovie3 is started, iDVD3 is not started. I edited a movie in iMovie and chose to Export to iDVD. I message appears saying "Launching iDVD" and there we are. Nothing has ever happened since, at least it seems so. The idea - if I understand this message right - would be to have iDVD started up automatically.

So, here is what I found out:

1) My movie was also about 90 minutes long. So I tried to Export a movie that is only 1 minute long. The same problem comes up: "Launching iDVD" and nothing happens. So, after a while I closed iMovie. What I noticed was that I had another file in my folder where the iMovie project was - same title as my iMovie project but with the extension .mov. Then, I started iDVD manually. I first tried to drag and drop the 90 minute .mov file onto the iDVD pane but that didn't work. In fact when I tried to import it through the menu, I received a message that this file was not compatible. Afterwards I tried to drag and drop the one minute .mov file  and it worked. After that I could click on the Status tab in iDVD and see that the movie was encoded as I was used to. Now, what happened? I suspect that my Mac was indeed exporting the file (in the background). The problem is that you don't have a clue what progress has been made and a 90 minute file may take rather long. The way iMovie2 and iDVD2 worked was that you export the movie and would see a progress bar. After the export was finished you would drag and drop the created file into iDVD. Also, you could give the exported file a name other than it seems to work with iMovie3/iDVD3. I am quite a bit frustrated how the new versions handle the export. What is weird though is that the 90 minute .mov file could not be imported into iDVD but I can still watch it in Quicktime! So the solution seems to be: Be very patient and after some hours just to try to import the created .mov file into iDVD. - No guarantee though!

2) I happened to find a possible workaround for this problem. The export-to-iDVD function does not work with iMovie3 and iDVD2.  When I was looking on the Apple support website I found a help for this problem: The topic is called "How to Export to iDVD 2" and this is what is suggested: 

1. Choose File > Export.
2. Choose "To QuickTime" from the Export pop-up menu in the Export window.
3. Choose "Full Quality DV" from the Formats pop-up menu.
4. Click Export.
5. Type a name for the exported movie and click Save.

I guess this should work with iMovie3 and iDVD3 as well. As I am typing this, my Mac is exporting the 90 minute movie. Hope it works. The chapter marks will not work though!

If there is anyone out there not having a problem with the iMovie3 export to iDVD3 export, I would certainly be interested in knowing how it should work properly.


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## Markim (Sep 25, 2003)

Exporting "To QuickTime" as "Full Quality DV" worked fine! And I could import the movie as I am used to. This solves the problem for the moment. But if I really, really want those chapter marks, I have to find a way to make this "launching iDVD" work. A problem that I may have had was the harddrive space. Unfortunately, using the "Export to iDVD" function in iMovie3 does not give any information about the progress made or disk space needed.


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## aaike (Sep 29, 2003)

My movie was definetly too long (more than 2h). iMovie 3 works verry slow on this amount of video (while the speed was OK in iM2) . A function that I was looking for and that is not present in IM is the possibility to split a project in 2... So I ended up making a copy of the project and doing the removal of the last hour by hand. This happens to be quite a drag since it isn't very easy to remove all audio segments at once.


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