Imovie "locking up"

Lately, imovie has been locking up, giving me the spinning rainbow ball, whenever I open an existing project. Therefore I can't work on the project, play it or do anything because the spinning rainbow ball won't let anything happen.
A typical project will have somewhere between 50-100 Gigs of space available to it so it's not a space issue.
The project will probably have dv imported, still photos, transitions, audio separated, music which has been edited and probably 10-15 minutes in length.
I've cleared preferences, run utility on the hard-disk, everything I can think of or find in these forums.
Any ideas or experience?

Thank you for responding. The music comes from audio CD's, not iTunes. I'm not sure why that would effect the entire project from locking up for long periods of time with the rainbow ball just spinning.
Any other ideas how I can fix this so iMovie runs?

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Got a new ext drive,now iMovie locks up when I turn Cam on to import film.

iMovie has been great up until I got a new Blackstar 250gb
sata 800/400 external hard drive.
as soon as I turn my Conon GL2 camera on, iMovie locks up and the computer is acting up.
I'm using the fire wire 800 for the Blackstar hard drive
and the camera imports with the 400
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Hej Bo
Well 800/400 indicates that You bought a FW disk - That's GOOD. USB =NONO
Now did You format it as Mac OS Extended ??
NOT AS Mac OS Exchangable or DOS or UNIX. Will not work.
Some Canon Cameras want to be Daisy Chained with the hard disk:
Mac <-> ext Hard disk <-> Camera
Some other doesn't like this at all (like my Sonys)
I would free up space on the internal drive by moving files out to the ext. disk
then disconnect it and do the Capture/Import
then move the movie project out to the ext disk (if it really is necessary)
If in Göteborg - Check up Göteborg Film och Video-klubb
Yours Bengt W

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Hi All
I have iMovie 11 and everytime I load it, it locks up whilst loading movies from iphoto. I have to force quite and when I reload again it asks about excluding an avi file in iphoto library. I exclude but then the same happens again.
Is there anyway of stopping it doing this. I have loads of movies from an old camera whcih probably got imported and would take an age to find them all
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Hi
My thoughts
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( UNIX / DOS / FAT32 / Mac OS Exchange - WILL NOT WORK FOR THIS ! )
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F. SET DOWN BURN SPEED to x2 or x4 MAX !
G. I only use Verbatim SL-DVD-R disks
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Yours Bengt W

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Imovie "locking up"

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