Imovie malfunction

I've been using Imovie on this machine for a over a year now and it has been working just fine. My usual procedure is to connect my Sony Mini DV camcorder via firewire. When I open Imovie, I set it to save the clips and project to external harddrive connected via Firewire 800. Recently I've been experiencing the following issues:
1) After selecting "import", Imovie starts the camcorder playback and the camcorder begins to play. Before anything is captured, Imovie shuts down. I receive the message "Imovie has shut down but all other programs are unaffected" (or something like that). It then asks if I want to send a report to Apple. Part of the report reads as follows:
Date/Time: 2009-01-19 11:23:47.886 -0800
OS Version: 10.4.11 (Build 8S2167)
Report Version: 4
Command: iMovie HD
Path: /Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS/iMovie HD
Parent: WindowServer [59]
Version: 6.0.3 (6.0.3)
Build Version: 14
Project Name: iMovieApp
Source Version: 2670200
PID: 250
Thread: 0
Exception: EXCBADACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERNINVALIDADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x356594ff
There is of course a lot more info than this but I thought I would share this and see what response I get.
2) Another symptom I sometimes experience is Imovie will start and capture fine but the desktop is visible through the Imovie screen. The Imovie screen is all there and functional, its just see-through (opaque?). When this happens, the whole process works fine beginning to end. When finished capturing I can do all my editing and whatever else I want to do, save it and use the project in IDVD just like normal.
Both of these problems can usually be remedied by turning the computer off and then back on. Once in awhile it has to be rebooted more than once in order to clear things up.
Looking forward to any help I can get.

I deleted the 'com. apple.imovie.plist file, however there was no number behind it. This seems to help, for the next 1 or 2 times that I open Imovie but then the problem presents itself again. Must I delete this file on a regular basis or is something else we can try.
I've been a little busy and don't have a lot of time to spend on this, thus the slow response from me. But I do thank you for your help and quick response.

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Ever since I upgraded from iLife04 to iLife05, I've had problems importing movies from my camcorder into my PB.
After doing numerous "do this trick" fixes, I finally got it to work reliably... as long as I do not have any other FW connected to the PB!!!
my internal HD is full (don't have free 13G space on my internal HD where I can dump 60min .dv file), so I cannot just keep importing into internal HD without shuffling several Gb worth of files back and forth between the PB and the external. Camcorder is connected to the FW400 port, and the external LaCie drive is connected to teh FW800 port (HD has its own power source, so the FW800 port is not driving current to the external HD. just data connection).
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now, with the exact same setup (FW800 external HD, FW400 camcorder) worked just fine using iLife04/iMovie4. So for now, I've been working around by booting up in a differnet partition with iLife04, import movie, then reboot into the main partition, and edit using iMovieHD. very painful.
any insight on this? is one of my FW ports fried? I've tried different cables, etc.. no luck. I have also checked to make sure the firmware on LaCie is the most recent.
all this happens with various flavors of Tiger OS. haven't tried installing iLife05 on my Panther partition (may be I should try).

Hi,
I'm a UNIX sys admin in other systems (SunOS, HPUX, etc) so UNIX is rather second nature to me. Been using UNIX since '85, Macs since '90 (forced to use Windoze in '97, and hating every moment of it). When MacOS merged with UNIX, I was mighty happy
as for the OS build, I do an archive-and-install prior to OS updates (I usually accumulate two updates before I do archive-install), to wipe out any accumulated garbage that may taint the OS (you dont' want to be doing this with other UNIX OS, but MacOS makes it easy). This is easy for me to do also, since I don't really install any system enhancement apps much so reconfiguring it back to what it was before doesn't take all that much time. Latest update that went through this archive-and-install is to 10.4.5. Haven't installed the latest security updates (there seems to be some weirdness with it, so..).
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Startup partition has approximately 8Gb free (it's a 15Gb startup partition). I looked at the VM allocation prior to partitioning, and it said 5G VM use, so I made sure there will be at least that much available free space after OS install.
I will never use a computer where I don't keep OS and user files in a separate partition, also insist on a secondary OS partition in case the primary fails (so I can still startup the darn thing. this secondary OS partition is very small, since it's only meant to be used for emergency use, and only has applications relevent to recovering data, repair etc). Had enough drive crashes and other problems hwere having separate partition was the only thing that saved me from losing the entire content of the hard drive (and yes.. all the files are periodically updated to my external). Also, makes it easy to do housecleaning (defrag, etc).. since sysOS partition and applications don't get defragmented all that much, only thing I'll have to "keep clean" usually is the user partition.
80Gb internal is plenty large to have good partitioning scheme.
anyway.. I digress...
if it is a matter of having enough swap space on the startup partition to run iApps, then i shouldn't be able to import to any hard drive, internal or external. if the iApps likes to dump temp files in the working directory, then internal (if I can do it) will be working with 13Gb free space while the external has 150Gb free space. again, not the problem..
so the issue is something with the FW use... I guess it's unclear whether this is an OS problemFW hardware problem, iMovieHD problem, or (gasp!) quicktime problem.

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Try deleting iMovie's preference file. This often fixes things when iMovie is misbehaving.
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Hi:
Michael Brown12 wrote:
Anyway, I want to do several things: 1.) I want to save my project so that I can open it at a later date and work on it again.
Quit iMovie and open it later when you want to restart your project.
2.) Related to #1, I want to start a new project, confident that my old project is still accessible.
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3.) I want to do twice daily back-ups of my working project so that if iMovie crashes I don't lose more than a half day of work.
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All of this has become almost automatic in my nearly 25 years of working on Macs. File saving and backing up are one of the few constants that, until iMovie, were unchanged. Apple, in a regrettable display of poor decisionmaking, has abandoned this tried and true procedure.
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Even Final Cut Pro, Apple's flagship edit software, has built in auto-save *in addition to* the manual save commands. I have my auto-save in FCP set to every two minutes.
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I would like to have a solution. But Apple is not available directly, so I can claim this malfunction or do you have a mail address, where you can claim bugs in FCP?
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General answer:
*Not knowing the origin to Your problem - General approach when in trouble is as follows:*
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From LKN 1935: (in this case = iMovie HD (5), I tried it all, but nothing worked.
Your answer (above) has been helpfull insofar as all the different trials led to the conclusion that
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