iMovie 3: out-of-synch audio

[Randy Wilson]

Well, I tried iMovie 3 out on my 600MHz G3 iBook
(14.1"/20GB/256MB/combo/OS X 10.1.5).  It imported 40 minutes of video
without doing the auto-stop-after-9-minutes trick that iMovie 2 under X
did sometimes.  That was good.

I like the new titles, transitions, growable window, editable
soundtrack volume, and several other slick things about it.  No sign of
the auto-scrambling-thumbnail-on-undo bug, either.

I agree with others that I miss having the playhead move along
continuously instead of jumping only a few times per second.  This is
actually more than just annoying: It makes it very difficult to split a
clip at a precise point.  Normally if there's a portion of a clip I want
to delete, I'll play the area where I want to put the split point a
couple of times, click the cursor just above the point where it seems
like the split point should go, hit space and re-click a couple of times
to make sure I'm not cutting a word in half, etc., then actually split
the clip there, check what I've done, and go on.  With iMovie 3,
however, you no longer seem to have the same amount of control.  It's as
though it doesn't give you more than 1/4 of a second of resolution on
when it is going to stop when you tell it to, nor where you want to
start.  Hopefully that will get cleaned up soon.

Also, I noticed that the audio (probably the whole clip, actually) was
stuttering in spots.  I haven't been able to determine for sure if it's
just having trouble reading from the hard drive (which is unfortunately
getting more full than I'd like), or whether the glitch happened on
import.

I took one section that seemed to have a stutter and cut & pasted it to
the beginning of my movie so I could output it to tape and listen to it
there to rule out hard drive trouble.  However, at that point, a much
worse problem showed up: The audio was about 1/2 a second out of synch
on the exported tape! Yikes! What's up with that??

I hope that gets fixed soon!