Imovie loss of visual?

My imovie stopped working mid project, having become really slow and constantly bringing up the little coloured circle.  It won't play in full screen and has stopped playing in the small screen.  It does play sound.  Yesterday it wouldn't offer me the option to share it to anywhere.  But I have done a test one today - with a fresh project - that one will let me share it and that works - but I cannot see it or get it to play anything but audio in imovies itself, which makes it difficult to create the movie obviously.  Does anybody have any suggestions why, or any idea what I can do to fix it?

Export your movie  using the SHARE MENU.  Use SHARE/MOVIE in Medium and Large size.
On the PC, you will need to install QuickTime for Windows. If your school has a technical support department, ask them to put this on there for you. It is a free download from Apple.

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    http://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm
    This will tell you that if you have 1.5 hours footage (I note you have far less), and you encode the audio to AC3 at 192Kbps, and you are hoping to fit this onto a standard recordable disc, single layer - often sold as 4.7Gb capacity, they actually hold 4.37Gb for what we need to do - you need to encode at no more than 6.5Mbps. However, lower bitrates mean smaller file sizes and so you can fit more footage onto your disc, but you will start to see a loss in visual quality if you go too low. Similarly, if you go higher you will gain file size, but you will also improve visual quality up to a point. There is a law of diminishing returns here - you get a bigger file, but you'll see little or no difference over 7.5Mbps. Also, if you encode at higher than 7.5Mbps you run the risk of the disc not playing back too well in a lot of players. Some will be fine, others may 'choke'. The top bit rate allowed for your video is 9.8Mbps, but don't go there... you'll get nothing but trouble with a recordable disc, IMO. As I said - this is an art and a science - you have to spend time to get this bit right.
    Once you have got the bitrate sorted and the files encoded you can move to authoring.
    DVDSP needs to be started up to create a 'SD' disc - not HD. You need to go through the preferences and make sure this is set correctly. When done, import the footage (which will be less than 4.37Gb in total).
    From there you should be good to go - add the assets to a track, create a menu and make at least one button, and point that at the track to get it to play. Set the end jump for the track to go back to the menu and you're about done.
    There are about a hundred 'gotcha's' along the way, which I can't hope to set out here. One simple one is to create a short piece of black 'slug' and add it as a small track (about a second long), and set this as your first play item. Jump from that to a menu and the disc will be a little more compatible with more players. The menu will also be an issue for some folk - the visual quality can be lower than you want - set your preferences in DVDSP for encoding to be at least 4.5Mbps and VBR. These encoding settings operate on the menus and anything that is not already encoded to the correct format.
    If you want to add chapter markers to help skip along the track then do so - but don't add any commands to them... they'll play back just fine one after the other. If you want to create a chapter index menu then that's easy enough too - but you then start to get into the decisions about how the playback should operate (i.e. one chapter and return to the menu, or start at the chapter and continue playing). It gets steadily more complex!
    Good luck with it - come back with questions if you run into issues.

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