Chronic slow-down of iMovie functions

I've used several versions of iMovie over the last few years, now running iMovie 09 version 8.05.
Nearing the end of my first project, all 23 minutes of it, and the whole app has started to slow down badly, just like in the old days of the first iMovie run on the first iMac with OSX.1.
So why now is my Quad Core having problems skimming through the opening shots of a 23 minute film? Most of it skims through OK, but the first 3 or 4 mins lock it up for several seconds instead of skimming over as it should.

yes, same thing has happened to my iMovie '09, just in the past week. I have a MacBook Pro w/ 4GB RAM, tons of HDD space, and have gone through several iMovie restart/OS X reboot cycles. I have also followed the suggestions from other threads including deleting all my cache, deleting the iMovie preferences, rebuilding my iMovie library, and reinstalling iMovie completely.
But as it stands now, iMovie is almost completely unusable. I get the spinning beachball constantly, I can't skim video, it stutters and hiccups constantly while trying to move clips around. Plus, some of my clips in the event browser don't play in the playback window - i hover over them for preview, hit spacebar and I get audio, but the preview window stays black. When I move the clips into the Project Library, playback works in the preview window.
As I said, this is a recent thing - w/in the past week. Before then, it was working great. Now, it's unusable.....

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I have the original AIR recently it has really slowed down. Every function usually gets the pinwheel. It is up to date and has 10g of free disk space. Any suggestions as to the cause?

I have the original AIR recently it has really slowed down. Every function usually gets the pinwheel. It is up to date and has 10g of free disk space. Any suggestions as to the cause?

Often a failed disk or power supply. See:
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Can't Fast Forward/Slow down in iMovie

I have the new iMovie and i took a video on my laptop with the iSight camera and will not let me speed up. Please help!

kasia_plus3 wrote:
I made my movie from still photos, but I hope It doesn't matter?
Yes, it does matter. The speed controls don't work on still images.
Instead you want to change the duration of the clip. Select the clip, click the Adjust Button then choose Clip Information (the little "i"). Enter the duration you wish you clip to last.
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Has anybody else noticed a 10-25% openGL slow down with 10.7.5?

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I remembered I'd done an xbench benchmark with 10.7.3 so I did a new one with the updates... sure enough the openGL numbers had dropped by 20% or so. So, I hooked up my backup drive with 10.7.3 on it and ran x-plane and xbench again to try to isolate the firmware update from the OS update.... The results were x-plane still showed a drop of about 10% and xbench about 25%. Looks like there is something wrong in 10.7.5.
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Thank you for this first reply! I'll have to give this a try later....the main laptop I experience this on crashed not more than an hour after I posted this issue. I'm on a tiny, slow netbook that hasn't had the same problem. Now I'm wondering if I picked up a Trojan on the main laptop and the "Not Responding" message is a side effect of a virus or Trojan.
One of the system .dll files has been corrupted and I'm not being allowed to use recovery discs, previous disc images, or any recovery options. That was an all day sucker yesterday and from what I've read on forums and have researched, it appears I'm going to need to reload the operating system. If it is indeed a Trojan/virus, I'm surprised it made it through my antivirus and firewall. Anything is possible, really.
Thanks again, I'll get back with results once I get the wounded laptop back up and running.

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It seems that you're sensibly thinking ahead, and preparing for any trouble!
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Your Mercury On the Go drive is probably quite small (60GB or 80GB), so why not use that for your iPhoto Library?
I've got 11,000 photos in my Library, and it uses up 33GB. So you could easily fit your 6,000 photos on your On The Go drive. Moving your iPhoto Library onto that external disc would clear, say, 16GB or so from your internal disc; enough for another hour's worth of DV video editing.
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Editing movies which are on an external fast FireWire disc generally allows things to run faster, as the internal disc can simultaneously do its own 'housekeeping' duties, or swapping things in and out of memory, or reading bits of program from the internal disc ..while all video data transfers happen exclusively on the external disc.
That's the way professionals edit: always keeping video files on a fast external - or second internal - disc.
The only problem which comes to mind is that some Canon camcorders don't like to be on the FireWire circuit along with any other FW device, such as a separate external disc. If you do have a Canon camcorder, you may need to import to your Mac's internal disc first, then disconnect the Canon camcorder and then copy that imported video to your external disc for editing.
But it's late here, and I gotta go to bed ..bye for now!

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Hey there.
I've got a query that really slogs. This query calls quite a few functions and there's no question that some of the work that needs to be done, simply takes time.
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It it possible to speed up or slow down music from my iTunes file?
http://www.bulletsandbones.com/GB/GBFAQ.html#changeimportedtempo
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blend
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Why do GarageBand, iMovie, Photobooth, and Hulu and Youtube videos slow down my whole computer?

I have a higher end 13" MacBook Pro running OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.8 that I purchased in August of 2010. About a month ago, I was using iMovie to edit a project when all of a sudden it started responding extremely slowly. Like, near impossible to work on my project slow. The whole computer was lagging, the mouse was unresponsive and I could barely use the gestures on the trackpad to get to different programs. Eventually the pinwheel of death showed up, and I quit iMovie. As soon as it closed, everything returned to normal. I restarted the computer to see if that would help, but as soon as I opened iMovie again, the whole computer started lagging. I then noticed that the same problem occured when I used GarageBand, iPhoto, Skype, and when I watched Hulu or YouTube videos. With all of these programs/sites, everything is running fine beforehand, but when I open them up, chaos sets in. This problem doesn't occur when I use other intensive programs like Photoshop or Illustrator, nor while I'm browsing the web. The only web problems are when I watch a video. Any video. Other than that, web pages are as quick to load as ever, and I can use the computer normally for any other task. This is seriously a problem because I use iMovie and GarageBand for school a lot, and my grades depend on me being able to use these programs effectively. All of these problems have persisted with these apps since that first instance about a month ago, and no significant changes occurred to instigate them. In attempts to solve the situation, I have cleared my cache, freed up space on my drive (I have 56 free gigs out of 320), I have verified and repaired the disk permissions, and I have downloaded the Apple provided Trojan removal tool for Snow Leopard. This seemed to work for about 10 minutes, but the apps and videos quickly started lagging and slowing down my whole computer again. If anyone else has experienced anything like this, I would love to hear exactly what has happened to you and to see what you did to [try to] fix it. Thanks for reading all of this, I need all the help I can get right now. Also, I can't watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report on Hulu anymore, and it's killing me! Thanks again.

It's very difficult to say without knowing more about your system. There are a number of possibilities. First, your 13" lacks a discrete GPU, so the CPU is doing the work that a GPU would have done as far as decoding video streams, etc. Each video stream will consume considerable resources from the machine, and if you have multiple things running with video streams being decoded (for example, a browser with video Flash or cumbersome animation and iMovie running at the same time), then that may be a factor.
Additionally, it could be that you are memory constrained. You didn't post a picture of the process list from activity monitor or the memory usage stats, but you probably want to look and see what the memory and CPU usage is and who's consuming what. Some applications are pretty inefficient. For example, if you have iPhoto open and have thousands of images, the indexed metadata and thumbnails are all stored in RAM. iMovie pulls in clip thumbnail sets - (and worse, it has to do on-the-fly transcoding video assets from some cameras that don't encode the video using the parameters it expects to make indexing frames easier). Again, this would show up as periodic spikes in CPU activity for the app.
You seem to have plenty of disk space, that's not likely to be a problem.
Check if Time Machine is running. Time Machine introduces a performance impact, but it's exacerbated by the presence of frequently changed large files (e.g., you don't want Time Machine backing up your video projects while you are working on them).
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New iMovie ? can not fast forward or slow down clips ??

Can anyone help me?
When i try to fast forward or slow down a clip in iMovie i can see the option in "Modify" menu but it does not allow me to select the options

The clip must first be in a Project before you can speed it up or slow it down.
You can't modify a clip when it's just in an Event.
Matt

Imovie '8- SPEED UP/SLOW DOWN

I know that the speed up/slow down option was taken off of imovie '8. My question is, what do I do? I have heard through the grapevine that you can download imovie '6 which does have that editing option, but I can't figure out how to do that? thanks for your time.

1) Upgrade to iLife 09
or
2) A free option is to use JES Deinterlacer. Karsten Schluter has a [tutorial on his excellent web site|http://sites.google.com/site/karstenschluter/slowmowithim08].
There are no legal free downloads of iMovie 06.

IMovie 08 slowing down

Subject: I movie slowing down
G5 Imac @ GHZ PowerPC
1.5 GB DDR SDRAM
Hard Drive 234 GB 125 available
Leopard 10.5.1
Imovie ‘08 7.1(506)
Help! This is becoming a big deal in my life when I expect to have time to edit and things just slow down so I can’t work on my projects. I may have to go back to Final Cut Express, but I like the promise of quick and easy editing.
I did import and edit a 2 minute tape a few weeks ago and was successful. Now I can’t seem to do another project.
iMovie 08 seems to have a tough time playing back video, importing video, making edits, when i hit a button it seems to take a few seconds to react.
I have run disc permissions, I have switched to thousands of colors vs. millions.
Help?
Todd

You can't do it within iMovie 08, but you can using external (free) software.
Details are here:
http://karsten.schluter.googlepages.com/slowmowithim08
Karsten is a major contributor to these discussion groups

Chronic slow-down of iMovie functions

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