[MacDV] Re: Quips & Quibbles with iMovie 3 (long)

[Thubten Kunga]

Geno,
When you play a video, does the scratch bar location triangle with the 
time code on it roll smoothly with all the frame count displaying like 
iMovie 2 did? Mine stutters across although the movie is playing fine, 
that triangle with time code jumps several seconds at a time instead of 
flowing across frame by frame with all the numbers flying by in iMovie 
2. Let's start with this quirk that I think a lot of us are getting. Is 
your's smooth or jerky?

k

On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 07:29  PM, Geno Kearney wrote:

> Hey Folks,
>
> There is something strange going on here. With fear in my heart, I 
> installed
> iMovie 3 from the box that arrived today. From all the reports, I 
> expected
> the worst. I was ready with a list of things I expected to go wrong. 
> Oddly
> enough, nothing seems to be wrong. It is a little slow loading. It 
> took 12
> seconds to start. It took about 1 second for a clip dragged from the 
> shelf
> to the timeline to appear. Other than that, everything has worked 
> fine. I
> loaded many old projects and they run fine. No stutter in audio or 
> video. My
> system is an 800mhz flat panel iMac with 1gb ram running OSX 10.2.3. 
> There
> is no way my system could be faster than Mike's dual 1 ghz machine. 
> Yet my
> playback and editing of old and new projects is going fine. I fully 
> believe
> that you guys are having the problems you describe. Yet some people are
> having no problems. Why. Could there be a batch of discs going out with
> corrupted data? I wonder if there is a problem in the downloaded 
> version.
> Mine came with 3.0.1 on the disc.
>
> Can it be determined that its people who are getting the downloaded 
> 3.0.1
> version that are having the trouble. Are people getting it from the 
> box also
> having problems? I'm just asking to try and figure this thing out. 
> Things
> just aren't making sense. Any thoughts?
>
> Geno Kearney
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dan Crumpler" <dcrumpl1 at tampabay.rr.com>
> To: "Macintosh Digital Video List" <MacDV at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
> Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 5:36 PM
> Subject: [MacDV] Re: Quips & Quibbles with iMovie 3 (long)
>
>
>> Mike,
>>
>> You are 100% on target.
>>
>> This new iMovie 3 is an abomination and an exercise in futility if you
>> want to just get your work done. After finishing this morning's school
>> announcements (a 7:00 am job that I can get done in peace before the
>> kids - middle school, pour in) I tried  iMovie 3 out. Thankfully the
>> finished tape was already in hand as we laboriously tried to grind
>> through some simple editing using a G4 dual 500 with a gig of memory.
>>
>> I bailed out after wasting 30 minutes, rebooted into 9.2, went back to
>> iMovie 2.11 and was able to finally load up the file, clean up the 
>> crud
>> from version 3. As far as I am concerned, that's the way my machine 
>> will
>> stay too. Life is too short to throw away time trying to nursemaid
>> Apple's folly into a working product.
>>
>> While I hope that Apple never quits supporting the old working 
>> software
>> that allows simple people like me to finish their work efficiently, I
>> think the writing is already on the wall. I'd rather switch to a 
>> decent
>> Windows system that just works than put up up with this foolishness 
>> from
>> Apple.
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> Michael Winter wrote:
>>
>>> I really wanted to like iMovie 3, but I'm having enough trouble with
>>> it I think I'm going back to 2.1. I'm hoping that by posting my
>>> experience some of the experts on the list may be able to help me 
>>> out.
>>>
>>> The system I'm using is a dual 1 GHz Quicksilver with 1.5 GB RAM
>>> running OS 10.2.3. For video in I'm using a Sony Digital Media
> Convertor.
>>>
>>> Launching iMovie 3 takes much longer, but I think that's related to
>>> the last edited project. So if I open a project that was created in
>>> iMovie 2, it seems to take forever. Opening projects made in iMovie 3
>>> takes less time, but even opening a "blank" project seems to take
>>> longer than iMovie 2.
>>>
>>> Importing video seems to work fine, except when I switch from
>>> importing to editing, then back to importing, I get the no camera
>>> message. I have to quit iMovie and restart to get it back (this works
>>> every time).
>>>
>>> I guess the other thing to mention is that during the import I
>>> sometimes get a wide black band either on the left of the view or on
>>> the top and bottom. This had me really worried, but when I go back to
>>> look at the clips after capturing them, the bands are gone. I'm
>>> wondering if the display is messed up because I resized the window 
>>> and
>>> it has to take a few shortcuts to display in real time.
>>>
>>> The user interface seems very slow. I click on a clip and it will 
>>> take
>>> a second (literally) for it to show in the viewer window, then 
>>> another
>>> second for the "scrubber" triangle to appear. I'm actually over there
>>> with the mouse pointer waiting for it to appear. OTOH, the non-UI
>>> stuff seems to be just as fast if not faster. If I push the right
>>> arrow on the keyboard to view a clip in iMovie 2, I can watch each
>>> frame go by, In iMovie 3, it seems to scroll by faster than real 
>>> time.
>>>
>>> Can anyone explain the clip selection logic? Seems like if I move a
>>> clip, or sometimes just click on it once, it does not become the
>>> selected clip. I have to click on it a second time.
>>>
>>> So I've done a bit of editing and its time to export to QuickTime.
>>> Because of some problems with iMovie 2 coming to a halt if in the
>>> background, I've gotten in the habit of exporting to "Full Quality 
>>> DV"
>>> then using Quicktime Pro to do the conversions. The good news is that
>>> this is now unnecessary because iMovie 3 will continue at full speed
>>> even when in the background. The bad news is that when I export to
>>> Full Quality DV my audio ends up out of sync. That's never happened
>>> before. I was hoping to use this method to get to VCD until Roxio 
>>> gets
>>> their plug-in updated.
>>>
>>> Some other things I've noticed with exporting:
>>>
>>> If you Export to QuickTime and use "Expert" you get the same dialog
>>> box you get when exporting using QuickTime Player and QuickTime Pro.
>>> You even get the same progress bar, which means you don't get an
>>> estimated time to completion.
>>>
>>> When I finally hit the "Export" button and get the file dialog to 
>>> tell
>>> it where to export to, more funny things happen. First, I want to
>>> change the default name of the output file, but I can't select just
>>> the part before the "dot". I either get the whole file name or just
>>> fhe dot and what's after. I can however use the arrow and delete keys
>>> to accomplish the task or just type in the whole name.
>>>
>>> When I try to navigate to a different drive to save the file, part of
>>> the file listing pops up outside the dialog box. With a few repeated
>>> attempts I can get what I want if I ignore the "ghost".
>>>
>>> Three times now I've had exports that didn't work. There is no error
>>> message and no file created other than  a 4 kB .mov file in the
>>> project folder. I haven't figure out what happened in these cases, 
>>> but
>>> I did notice that the export did not take as long as it should have
>>> (twice I was exporting to mp4, once to full quality DV).
>>>
>>> My plan for now, since I installed iMovie3 using the System Update
>>> method, is to go on a seek and destroy mission to get rid of
>>> everything iMovie related, then do a "clean" iMovie 3 install. If 
>>> that
>>> doesn't clear some things up its back to iMovie2.
>>>
>>> -Mike