IMovie Needs To Generate Thumbnails

When I open iMovie I get this message:
iMovie needs to generate thumbnails for the videos in your iPhoto library. This process may take several minutes.
You can postpone this operation by clicking Later, but your iPhoto videos will be unavailable until the next time you restart iMovie.
I can either choose Later or Now. When I choose now, it begins to "generate my thumbnails", but the time remaining starts at about 2 minutes and continues to climb until the time remaining is as high as 100 minutes and I have to force quit. When I choose later, all of my clips have an exclamation point in the corner and I am unable to view any of them.
How do I fix this?

Hey!!!!
What imovie is doing is basically making all the movie clips from iphoto accessible. The amount of movie clips you have in iphoto affects the time. You might try going through your movies in iphoto and cutting back on the ones you don't need. Or you could just wait.
Sometimes the mac estimated time things do the climbing thing. Depending on what you are doing, they sometimes drop as quickly as they climb.
The fact of the matter is that it might just take that long. So you just have to be patient.
-Hooked

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Imovie is not generating thumbnails for MPG video files

Hi everyone,
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Thanks.

No, the orientation is not the issue, The first set of 4 imported videos were from a GoPro 3 camera, and the one that was lost doing an "update thumbnail" operation was also a GoPro3 fie.
Just now I did another experiment, I chose to update thumbnail from a video file created with my Pentax WG-3 and it worked.
I updated thumbnail on a horizontal and verticle video from my Galaxy S3, and now those are also gone with no thumbnail...
So far the only one that actually works for me is the Pentax video, which is a MOV file. , the GoPro 3 and Galaxy are mp4 files, so it's possible that the mp4 format has something to do with it. This is very frustrating losing my thumbnails like this.... Luckily I have not deleted ver11 yet.
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IPhoto needs to generate thumbnails, then freezes. What can I do?

When I open iPhoto, it says that it needs to generate thumbnails. As it does, popups say "Alert cannot find file." There are about one to two hundred of these popups, and they have two buttons: "Find file" and "cancel." A loading bar shows the progress, but it only advances when I click "cancel." After an infuriating twenty minutes, the status bar is finally complete, only to have iPhoto freeze. It cancels logout and shutdown; the only way to get out of it is to perform a cold stop. What can I do?
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Seven thousand photos is not a big library these days. We've seen reports from people with in excess of 300,000 images in their. I have a library more than 6 times the size of yours, so we can take it that the quantity is not an issue.
iPhoto is telling you what the problem is - it can't find the files that are meant to be in the Library.
Are you running a Managed or a Referenced Library?
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A Referenced Library is when iPhoto is NOT copying the files into the iPhoto Library when importing because you made a change at iPhoto -> Preferences -> Advanced. (You unchecked the option to copy files into the Library on import) The files are then stored where ever you put them and not in the Library package. In this scenario you are responsible for the File Management.

IMovie 11: issues generating thumbnails with large import

I have a HDV tape that was in a flood, and is not in great condition (It's a sentimental family movie). It imported OK, but iMovie recognized scenes really weird, in that it separated the 60 minute tape into so many segments (157) that it's causing fits for iMovie to generate thumbnails. At the import, it got all the way to the point where it said it had 1 minute left -- but it stayed there for over 3 hours. So I "forced quite" iMovie. I relaunched it, and it did basically the same thing -- it got to a minute left, then stayed there for several hours. So I forced quit it again. This time it got to the point where it said 4 hours left, and I left it over night. It was in the exact same spot this morning. So I forced quit, then rebooted the whole computer. When it came up this time, it said it had less than a minute, but it's now growing in time (the bar is moving towards the right, so maybe it's working...we'll see).
The problem is now, as soon as I boot up iMovie, it automatically goes into the generate thumbnails mode, and I can't do anything else with it. So, my question is 3 part.
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By the way, here's a video of my issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGHjiv0-5y0&feature=youtu.be

Imovie freeze on generating thumbnail for iphoto videos

When I open imovie, there is a message that says "do you want to generate iphoto video thumbmails?" now or later. As I have iphoto videos missing in imovie, i press on now. It then says that a certain movie is missing and then freezes and I cannot quit imovie.

Hi there,
I would recommend trying the troubleshooting steps described in the article below.
iMovie: How to troubleshoot "Application Unexpectedly Quit" messages
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3143
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After much research and troubleshooting, GoToMeeting replied with the final answer: We do not support the uploading of recordings to editing software. If you are having issues uploading a recording, unfortunately, we do not have tools or steps to resolve this. It is not a supported feature. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
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Importing video while iMovie generates thumbnails

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Imovie 9.09 unable to generate thumbnails on my iMac running 10.6.8

I'm trying to digitise camcorder footage currently saved on vhs tape. Although I'm now using a 27"iMac running Yosemite, I don't have the usb lead with the std usb connector on the computer end to connect the digitiser to it, so I'm using my old iMac running 10.6.8 and iMovie 9 as I have the correct lead for that iMac.
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When I tried to import 2 hours as one file the conversion appeared to be going ok until I stopped it. I then got a message saying that it was generating thumbnails and would take a minute. this changed to 2, then 9, then 2 hours, then 4 hours. After it had been running for 12 hours with no change in the 4 hours estimated for generating the thumbnails i did a force quite, then tried to get back into iMovie.
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Advice please.

Save the photos to the camera roll on the iPad, then connect it to your computer with a USB cable. You can import the photos using iPhoto if you have it or image capture if you don't.

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Hello -
I'm hoping someone has the answer for this. When I first started using iMovie 08 everything worked fine. It generated thumbnails the first time it opened, and they were there each time I re-opened the program. Then out-of-the-blue they disappeared, and iMovie needed to regenerate them each time open the program (which takes about 30 minutes).
Helpful info? The only thing I noticed is that I have several types of movie files (.mov,.avi,etc..) all mixed in together, but as far as I can tell they were like that when the program was working well. I have looked for duplicates, and again, any duplicates would have been there when everything was working ok.
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Hello there Clayguy7,
If I understand correctly you are unable to use iMovie because it keeps closing on you for no reason as soon as you open it. I would like to recommend the troubleshooting information in the following article to help you out here:
iMovie: How to troubleshoot "Application Unexpectedly Quit" messages
Start with this step, and there is more in the article if you need it:
2) Disable non-essential QuickTime components.
Navigate to /Library/QuickTime/ for a list of components currently installed.
Temporarily disable any components that are not in the list below. You can disable the components by moving them to the Desktop or another folder outside of the /Library/QuickTime/ folder.
Open iMovie and see if the issue is resolved. If iMovie no longer unexpectedly quits, check to see if an updated component is available, or contact the developer of the component for further recommendations.
iMovie uses the following components, and should be left in the QuickTime folder:
AppleIntermediateCodec.component
AppleMPEG2Codec.component
Note: There may also be a similar folder at ~/Library/QuickTime/ depending on the components you have installed. If this folder is available on your Mac, remove any components as instructed in step 2. Both of these locations hold QuickTime components. The components help you encode or decode different types of multimedia content.
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
Take care,
Sterling

Everytime I open iMovie, it generates thumbnails...

Really, I open, wait forever, close, immediately open, and then wait forever again...it always generates thumbnails everytime I open iMovie.
Do I need to set write permissions somewhere?
Where do these thumbnails get stored?
I do have video on an external FireWire drive.

I get this even worse. Not only does it regenerate every time I start, but every time I do anything.
I move clips from lets called "EventA" to "EventB" and it generates previews for EventA, EventB and EventC - it redoes EventC every time I do anything.
It makes it almost impossibly slow to use, and I have a Mac Pro.
Scott

TS3391 iMovie 11 is not working. I try to open it and it says it is generating thumbnails for one of my previous projects. All the commands are gray. I have to force it to quit. I just want to capture clips to start a new project.

iMovie 11 is not working. I try to open it and it says it is generating thumbnails for one of my previous projects. All the commands are gray. I have to force it to quit. I just want to capture clips to start a new project. I googled the problem and there were discussions about deleting files in various folders and renaming clip extensions. I don't like the solutions I saw there and I am not sure they will work.

Nobody replied so I called Apple. They seemed to think they could fix the problem but I had to agree to pay about $20 first. I told them to put it down as a complaint. I only want to use the software I bought. I can't see that it is my fault it is malfunctioning. I guess I will have to pay. It doesn't seem right.

IMovie update 7.1.2 crashes at start while generating thumbnails

Since I updated iMovie to v7.1.2 it crashes every time I open it. First shows a message saying that a camera has been detected (although there is no camera connected) Then it starts generating thumbnails and crashes.
I re-installed version 7.1.1 and works wonderfully

After a very patient work I could make my iMovie work.
When the iMovie 7.1.4 update starts (7.1.2 had the same issue) it checks your HD (and all other storage devices you may have connected) for video files. This is different from version 7.1.1. If during the check, for any reason, cannot access a file, it crashes.
In my case I had to check permissions for every video file and/or folder containing them until I solved the problem. Fixing permissions with Disk Utility or changing permissions for a folder and all enclosed subfolders, it is not enough. You have to check each individual file. Not very difficult but time consuming.
Now iMovie is working fine. I really regret that Apple made a change in the two last updates without any warning. After all the turmoil provoked in this and in other related forums by desperate iMovie users experiencing this problem, they should have acknowledged the issue. By the way. it started last June. I would have expected that they publish some suggestions in their support website.
I spent almost 4 hours doing what finally was the answer to the problem. Not to mention the timeless trials I made during the last months.

IMovie 11 stuck on "generating thumbnails"

I have 1 TB of movies that worked fine in iMovie09. I open iMovie11 and it gets stuck like in the attached photo.
1. I tried using it after every upgrade, it never worked.
2. iMovie11 works fine with newly imported movies (tape/DV, AVI, MOV, etc) - imports them fine, doesn't get stuck.
3. I could move the old movies to a different directory (not iMovie Events) and import them in iMovie11, but I hate the idea. It took forever to import 500GB from iMovie06/HD into iMovie09 and I accepted it as a one-time backward incompatibility. I expected iMovie11 to be backward compatible with iMovie09.
My question is why does it get stuck and how to fix it. Other than reimporting 100 DV tapes or iMovie 09 events?
Thanks in advance.

Hi
Me just thinking
• Panic Halts = error builds up on Hard Disk - I always do a
- Repair Permissions (Disk Util tool) - and -
- Repair Hard Disk ( I start my Mac from install DVDs and select Disk Util tool from this - as it can not mend the a Disk with a running Mac OS (brain surgery on one self is not recommended))
• Generating Thumbnails
- Can take LONG TIME - I just let it be to do it's job
- If ridiculously long time >2 hour even > one day - then in my cases it's been due to a too full Hard Disk.
I never let Main Start-Up (Mac OS) Hard disk go less than 25Gb free space - ever.
Yours Bengt W

HT1014 I'm working with imovie 08 and converted movie originally from VHS tape to .m4v files imovie wouldn't recognize it. I converted to .mov files and imovie generated thumbnails (for hours) and shows a New Event but there is nothing there. Any help?

I'm working with imovie 08 on Macbook pro OS X and converted movie originally from VHS tape to .m4v files imovie wouldn't recognize it. I converted to .mov files and imovie generated thumbnails (for hours) and shows a New Event but there is nothing there. Any help?

markmc78 wrote:
.. I'm really struggling with the concept of events/clips/projects.
consider usage of a diff. editor.. iMovieHD6, you're entitled for a free downlaod at apple.com:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html
but IF you're relaxed, opened your mind, follow the bright light, ommmm.. for Events & Stuff:
your intended workflow will add another step of quality-degradition (8mm>>avi>>mp4>>iM08) ..
consider the free tool Mpeg Streamclip www.squared5.com for 'chopping' that 90min beast into pieces..
rename these new chunks, follow advice given on my site:
http://karsten.schluter.googlepages.com/im08changeeventdate
there's the manual..
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iMovie08_GettingStarted.pdf
and the most recommended books from Mr Pogue's Missing Manual series..

IMovie Needs To Generate Thumbnails

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