Cannot eliminate OS9 - because of iMovie!

[jove]

Hello,

I thought 10.2 would fix this issue, but it has only gotten worse. Movie imports from my Sony camera will do any of the following. The project can be on an interal or external drive.

a) just stop after a time
b) cause iMovie to unexpectedly quit
c) always create corrupt thumbnails
d) kernel panic
e) corrupt the destination drive

iMovie in OS9 works. (c sometimes happens).

 

[SkipNewarkDE]

I had similar problems with iMovie in OS X.

The import problem seems to be related to Energy Saver settings, but only somewhat. To explain: Anytime the iMac or iBook dimmed the screen during an import, the import would just STOP happening. In order to get around this, I had to tell the machine to never sleep the screen, and disable any screen savers. But there is another type of dimming that I have not figured out how to disable in OS X. There is a screen sleep setting in Energy Saver that allows the screen to be turned off after a certain amount of time. The Mac will still turn down the screen brightness if left unattended... not to full dark, but just a bit dimmer. When this happens, the imports have a tendency to fail. To keep this from happening, I had to sit at the Mac, and push the mouse every now and then to prevent a screen dim.

The mystery crashes and thumbnail problems may be related to a corrupted copy of QuickTime. Chuck your iMovie preferences, chuck your QuickTime preferences, or try re-installing QuickTime. Note that if you were using the QuickTime 6 beta with the OS X iMovie, these are all known problems. It is a good bet that any projects or files created using this beta will be problematic.

Your best bet is to get the latest QuickTime, included with Jaguar, trash the above mentioned preferences, and build new projects... perhaps even re-importing the video if necessary.

Most of my problems have gone away now that I have upgraded and started fresh projects.

 

[super_pup]

ive had similar problems
firstly i was trying to import to an external firewire....not a good idea apparently, as it crashed. since found out importing to external firewires not supported or something. dont know. then, same problem as the whole stopping importing thing mid-way thru - again, it was the energy saving thing. but after all that it crashed all the time every time i added titles or just even scrolling along. it was screwed prety much. i tried trashing preferences and the like - didnt help. finally i got so pissed that i backed up my music & docs & fave apps and did a software restore. now it works beautifully

 

[SkipNewarkDE]

The crashing when trying to add titles was what was happening with me, and was indeed related to a very misbehaving QuickTime 6. I was unwittingly using the public beta. Once I updated, the problem went away.

On exporting to camera, I had some dificulties too where the export would just stop without warning. This was related to the energy saver problem.

 

[jove]

Hello,

The mentioned problems have been going on since iMovie first appeared, various versions of Quicktime on two iMacs and an iBook. It was never stated that importing to an external drive was not supported :-( And to think we purchased a drive just for that purpose!

I eliminate the corrupt thumbnails by splitting the clip at the first frame and trashing the fraction-of-a-second clip. Not elegant but it works. Sleep is now turned totally off when using iMovie.

I'll try trashing the prefs. These projects are new using the latest OS/QuickTime/iMovie.

The internal drive seems to have trouble keeping up. So one drive is not supported and the built in Apple supplied one is too slow. Any recommendations for defragging?

Thank you for the suggestions.

 

[themacguy]

There have been many discussions about this topic (elsewhere on the web so how would you know?).

1. FireWire hard drives - Nope; can't reliably use them for importing from your camcorder nor exporting to the camcorder from the FW drive. This appears mostly in OSX but has been known to happen in OS9. Symptoms: Blue screen on Mac but camcorder still running (import), or blue screen on camcorder with iMovie still exporting. Solution: Use internal ATA drive. Hopefully fixed in Jaguar; will know next week when my dual-867 arrives but I'm planning to install a 120GB internally, anyway. When I installed an extra internal ATA in my B&W and used it instead of a FW drive, the "blue screen" problem went away.

2. Energy Saver settings - You must set EACH of the three settings (computer, screen, and hard drive) to the "don't sleep", "don't dim", and "don't spin down", respectively. You can't simply set the computer to "never"; the screen setting (at least) is not totally controlled by the "computer" setting. (Hope that makes sense.) This has been an OS9 issue but, again, has been reported on OSX (pre-Jaguar). (I don't use OS9 but did set my OSX ES settings accordingly, "just in case".)

Regards,
Barry