Jerky playback of iMovie 6

Can anybody tell me, if Apple is going to fix the issue of QUICKTIME 7.5 vs. iMovie 6.0.4?
Reverting to a prior issue of Quicktime using "Pacifist" is not an option because the latest
version of iDVD will only function with Quicktime 7.5. and I like iDVD 7.0.2.
I find it hard to understand that in spite of the great number of disenchanted iMovie enthusiasts
Apple is not moving faster in finding a solution to this most annoying iMovie problem.
Hank

I read your comments about using the option to 'Play DV project through to DV camera' with great interest. Although I have made over 100 iMovies, my recent one is the first one I've done after upgrading to QuickTime 7.5. I did that by accident, clicking on it instead of another option. It was already installed before I realized what happened, so I just went with it. I knew that Klaus1 had posted that he had had no problems with it, and my computer is similar to his.
Everything went well until I added my audio clips, and the stuttering began. I had been used to this in iMovie 5, and somewhat in version 6, so I knew that my edits would be fine and the disk image and burned DVD would play just fine....and they did.
However, one of the reasons I have continued with iMovie 6 is that I want to export my finished iMovies back to DV tapes for preserving them. Usually, I just connect my Sony camcorder, click on Share, video camera and I am set. This time, I could not get the export to the camcorder. Everything looked ok, the connections were fine, and the movie played smoothly.....but only the audio went to the camcorder. I checked it out, since another camcorder had stopped recording video, but would record audio. No, this one was fine.
I then tried the 'Play through to DV' option, and had to reset the camcorder to dupe/rec CTRL, a setting that I previously had not had to select.
Amazingly, it worked flawlessly!
Because I had already burned my DVDs, saved a disk image of the project, and now had a DV tape of the iMovie, I deleted it, so I cannot try to see if that option would eliminate the stuttering playback of my iMovie, but I will definitely try it with my next one.....already have it started!
Thank you for posting that solution. Will let you know if it works.
Meanwhile, Klaus1.......congrats on Level 4. ....and why do you not have the stuttering problem?

Similar Messages

Does adding RAM help solve iMovie4 jerky playback

I have been reading threads about jerky playback in iMovie4 in large projects, after adding music from iTunes etc. My wife has a monster project and playback during editing has became very eratic. I have emptied cache, repaired the hard drive, repaired permissions etc. I have not tossed iMovie preferences. I have 23 gigs of space on the HD and a 250gig external FW HD that I bought after she started the project on the internal HD. I would like to know from you experts: 1. Would it help to move the project to the larger external HD? 2. Would adding RAM help (currently iMac G5 1.8mhz with 768 megs RAM)? 3. Is there any way to tell if the project will export to iDVD smoothly if it continues to look terrible in iMovie playback? I hate to go through a few hours of rendering for nothing. Thanks so much for your help. I always find good and useful info in discussions.
Mike Ryan

Michael, there are some very useful applications that I highly recommend to keep your Mac running smoothly. As a defragmenter I use Allsoft's Disk Warrior that also has a very good directory repair feature. Check out also Drive Genius that has a host of useful features. Also get iMovie file fixers, invaluable tool that is free that will allow iMovie to import certain files in audio and photo formats that are greyed out and also has other features. I believe I got mine from Mr. Lennart Thelander in previous posts here. Cache Out is an excellent application to clear out cache files. I also advise you do a regular permission repair from Disk Utility in your Utilities folder that is on your Mac. These are basically my must have applications. As for copying your iMovie project to your external, just drag your entire project folder ( the blue one with the media and star folder(s) in it directly in the external hard drive. I find that iMovie is one application that requires a clean (defragmented) drive with ample space to spare. I defrag my drives if I trash files often from them, or if I notice erratic and jerky performance or slowness in response. I hope that some of my suggestions will help your in your editing.

Jerky Playback and freezing

When in editing mode I am getting occasional freezing and jerky playback but the sound track continues to run. The same in full playback
The machine is a new 24" 3.06 so I doubt it is a lack of resource problem. Any advice would be appreciated.

oldmovieguy,
Hmmmm...maybe we're on to something!
I did begin another thread, to draw attention to this specific problem we've isolated. Hopefully, between the two of us, we'll figure this thing out! It is VERY annoying. Especially, since creating a movie in the new Imovie 09 is a snap. Luckily, I had marked all my good footage with a star, so I can recreate a project in a jiffy!
Message was edited by: JBK

Jerky Playback Solution

For all that have been experiencing the "jerky movie playback" or the "freeze frame syndrome" I offer this solution. I feel very confident with it as I experienced similar slow downs with my old Power Mac 8500 years ago and it was the exact same issue. At that point I had just upgraded to the most current version of Quicktime. It created a slowdown with just about every process one could think of, right down to the redraw rate on my screen (excruciatingly slow). I eventually solved the problem by downgrading back to the previous version of QT..
In any case after recently upgrading my Imac to QT 7.0x (7.03 to be exact) from 6.5.2 I began to experience the dreaded "jerky playback" to movies that had previously run very smoothly; all movies, all sizes, and with all varieties of audio clips, music and voiceovers. It was such extreme degradation that it rendered IMovie virtually unusable. From my previous experience I immediately suspected the QT upgrade. After researching everyone's discussion threads for a couple of hours I was convinced that QT 7.0x was indeed the problem and I immediately downgraded to 6.5.2, .... and voila; my movie projects returned to their old reliable selves. (and that's with a mere 5gb free space on my hard drive). So if you're experiencing "jerky playback" I strongly suggest a QT downgrade to 6.5.2. You can find the downgrade options on the Quicktime discussion board. Hope this helps you as it did me. Happy movie making.

Too bad you were so in a hurry downgrading, you didn't even perform some troubleshooting. QT 7 does have advantages, mainly H.264 support.
I quote Karl Petersen:
”Some people have reported smoother playback after resetting QuickTime preferences. (Yes QuickTime, not iMovie.) To do that quit iMovie, open System Preferences and click on the QuickTime icon. Change something (anything). Close System Preferences. Re-launch iMovie HD.”
I quote Steve Summers1:
”I found out that since I had done an upgrade install of Tiger, I still had old versions of QuickTime components in my /Users/~/Library/QuickTime/ folder. These had the same names as the new QuickTime 7 components which were in the /System/Library/QuickTime/ folder. QuickTime was trying to load the old components from my user library into the new QuickTime application.
”I deleted the old ones from the user location, along with some of the really old (circa 2002) non-competing components which were still in there. Then I restarted, just for good measure.
”My error messages went away, and QuickTime 7 is working as it should.”

Jerky playback, sluggish operations while editing

I've never had any troubles with video until now. I'm getting jerky playback on my machine, where under the previous iMovie I didn't. The playback display will freeze and skip, while the vertical red place marker pauses and jumps forward. The video doesn't have sound at this point, so I don't know if sound is skipping. I'm running on a 30" Cinema display with iMovie filling the screen.
When I take actions, such as clicking on a clip, there's a slight pause before the action happens. Scrolling through video to find the right frame to split on is very sluggish.
The type of video that I'm editing are screen movies created using Snapz Pro X (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/) at 30fps, saved as MP4's highest quality. Yes, it's a lot more space, but I like to preserve as much quality as possible through the editing process.
Activity Monitor shows that I have 266MB of RAM free, so I don't believe I'm running into swapping problems. At the suggestion of an Apple Store employee, I had an authorized Apple repair place upgrade the hard drive (to 7200RPM; weeee!) a year ago since they don't do after-market upgrades.
I've used iDefrag to defrag the filesystem. I'm maxed out on RAM (2GB; first generation MBP).
What types of things should I be looking for to get smooth playback while editing?

I doubt if any card works well with CS5.
It's best to have an Adobe PC without any video signal card.
1. Use a capture/playout PC to capture and view the images, preferably also without using any Adobe software.
2. Then do your stuff on the Adobe PC.
3. Transfer the mixdown of the video to your capture/playout PC, check the field order and print to tape (without Adobe) or deliver the file.
For now, Matrox MXO2 is also unusable with CS5. Boris FX makes things even worse.
My PC is extremely powerfull, so that can't be it, but it's very unstable.
Manufacturers of cards and Adobe don't work hard enough to combine their products and they just blame eachother.
It used to be quite nice semi-pro stuff for editing but forget that with any video hardware for the time being; it dropped to amateur level.
I'm done trying to fix it or waiting for solutions; I just issue warnings for other users and buyers now.

Jitter, stutter, or jerky playback on output

Hi friends,
I've edited a video in Premiere Pro CS4 and it plays smoothly in the timeline. However, when I export it for DVD output, and then preview it in Encore, every minute or so, it will play one frame out of order. I don't know whether to describe this as a jitter, a stutter, or jerky playback. The preview is accurate: if I burn a DVD from Encore, the DVD will have the same glitches in playback. Again, Premiere plays everything fine.
The frame can be pulled from before or after the current point in the timeline. The first glitch occurs at 08s 15f and plays frames in the clip in this order: 1,2,3,4,17,6,7,8,9... Then it goes to 01:24:15 and partway into another clip does this:
24s:14f
24:15
24:00
24:01
24:16
25:02
24:17 (back to normal)
Both of these clips with these symptoms have a lot of movement (people moving independently in the frame, plus camera movement), but there are other clips with nearly as much movement, and they do not have a problem.
The source footage is AVCHD 720 30p in a matching timeline. I do have some SD footage later in this timeline. This SD footage was captured to the computer via Firewire from a Canon Optura. It is "Scaled to Frame Size" and rendered in the timeline, and is causing zero problems. I exported using the Media Encoder. I am outputting to DVD using the MPEG2-DVD and NTSC Widescreen preset, with the aspect ratio changed from 16:9 to 4:3 and the quality set to 4.5.
I'm running Premiere Pro version 4.2.1 and Encore 4.0 on an Intel Core 2 Duo T9550 2.66 GHz with Windows 7 (64 bit), 4 GB RAM, a 5400 RPM 320 GB hard drive running the OS and the video files located on a USB 2.0 7200 RPM hard drive.
If any of you have ideas, I would be grateful.
Thanks,
Russ

I've been having this problem since installing Snow Leopard with QuickTime 10 way back when and it's caused me real problems with video rendering. I think it's a codec issue as my raw video files play back ok (H.264 codec), but when I export them and save as Photo jpeg or motion jpeg etc the playback has about 4 or 5 seconds of jerky playback near the beginning of the file.
I've just tried opening all my test files with QuickTime v7 and was staggered to see them all run perfectly. It is indeed very annoying.

Jerky playback in Bridge CS4

I get jerky playback of Hi Def mov files shot on my Canon 7D when playing them back through Bridge. The same movies play smoothly with no stuttering whatever on the same machine through Nero or any other player I have installed. According to my camera manual, the frame rate of these movies is 25 fps (I am in the UK using the PAL TV system) and so I set Bridge to play back at this rate (it was originally set to something like 29.77) but that made no difference. Is Bridge using a different codec or what?

Bridge uses Quicktime, so any performance issues wil lhave to be attributed to that, most likely.
Mylenium

Jerky playback

All of a sudden I'm getting jerky playback of video. I've tried the usual fixes: trash preferences, delete render files, repair permissions, repair disk, but nothing has helped. This happens in timeline and also with individual clips in the viewer, on all projects, playing from a variety of hard drives. It may be a coincidence, but it started happening today right after I played a few of the videos on the new google video site. Also, when I open the Mac Finder, the columns are slightly jerky, snaping back and forth laterally, which leads me to guess the problem might be in my system rather than in FCP, so a re-install of FCP might not help. My other programs are working normally. Any suggestions? I'm running the latest FCP 5.0.4.

Perhaps it is now time for the Harpoon solution (aka the Guinness solution in the mid and far west)
for those not in the know:
1. turn everything off.
2. unplug firewire cables
3. unplug power cords
4. get up from well worn chair
5. walk to refrigerator
6. open refrigerator
7. remove bottle of Harpoon (Guinness, local micro brew, etc)
8. pop cap
9. pour into glass ( you AREN'T going to drink it from a bottle, are you?)
10. sip responsibly. enjoy the moment. think pure thoughts
11. return to kitchen. If less than 15 minutes has elapsed, have another. Otherwise, retrurn to edit room.
12. Plug everything back together
12. fire up external monitors, VTR, external hard drives & computer in that order.
does it work now? If yes, congratulate your self. If not, oh well, but at least you are in a much better frame of mind to begin some serious troubleshooting.
cheerios,
∏

HELP! Jerky playback on Premiere Pro 6.0.2 CS6 and Retina MBP (16GB)

Dear all!
Please help me to solve this problem!
It's going on Premiere Pro 6.0.2 CS6 and Retina MBP with 16GB RAM installed.
CUDA Driver Version: 5.0.24
MacBook Pro Retina, Mid 2012
Processor 2,7 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB
Software OS X 10.8.1 (12B19)
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 (6.0.2. - 072)
While playing back inside PP a jerky playback occurs, every 1-2 seconds it rewinds to 2-3 frames back and continues to play forth...
No special console messages or something similar visible.
Have tried to clean the cache but it doesn't help. Also have tried to switch the mode between CUDA, OpenCL and SW - without any visible changes...
Exhausted... Please HELP!!!!

avrbox, I had the same problem and went crazy because I didn't find a proper solution. I use Windows, though. Finally, I got to fix the problem. I use a i5 processor, which I overclocked with an asrock tool that came with the mainboard (to about 3350 MHZ where the system ran stable). When I turned overclocking off, Premiere played back the clips just fine. I overclocked then step by step until the playback went jerky again and kept that frequency. Maybe your processor is overclocked by stock or you did it manually?
Hope this is your solution!

Jerky playback - even after render

Hi There
I recently animated a clip based on the 20th Century Fox intro, and then imported the clips into Final Cut Express to touch it up and render it out. When viewing it in FCE it appeared to skip a frame or so every 50 frames. I figured this was just something happening within the application, and that when I exported it to a QuickTime Movie, it still did the same thing.
Any ideas on why this might be happening, and how to solve it? The problem is definitely arising from FCE, not the animation software. If it would help, here's the clip here that was exported from FCE. http://dominomf.com/smcfiles/Cuby__20th%20Century%20Sheep44.mov (.mov 2.1 MB)
Cheers
Cuby

Thanks for the comment. The reason I've used a frame rate of 26fps is because the DVD I used to watch the original 20th Century Fox clip had a frame rate of 26fps, and doing the same thing in 'Blender' allowed me to get my parody as close as possible to the original, as far as timing goes.
Do you think if I re-rendered the clip from Blender as a DV-PAL format, this would make any difference?
The clip linked to in my first post was going to be the finished product, so that is why I would like to get rid of this jerky playback.
Thanks again
Cuby

Jerky playback in elements organizer

Hoping some one can help out here. I've downloaded the trial version of Premiere elements to edit videos captured with a Kodak playsport. When I view the captured video in the organizer, it a very jerky playback. When I play back using Windows media player or quicktime, it's nice and smooth.
I've tried capturing the MOV files in 720p and 720p (60fps) and have the same issue.
Anyone have any suggestions?

Jerky playback in PE is almost always because you have not rendered the area where the jerk is. - or else you dont have a fast enough computer or enough RAM or have everything on one computer hard disk.
If you have a horizontal red line above any of your video in the time ine it means you dont have it rendered. It is caused every time you insert a transition or effect or if your original meaterial doesnt match the original project settings when you imported the video.
You dont have to render the whole project if there are only parts with a red line - just adjust the work space pointers to cover the red line and render that.
There are numerous posts in this forum about it and the way to cure it

Jerky playback of movies only in iTunes

Have movies that play perfectly directly from Quicktime (7.1.3) and when loaded on the iPod with iTunes. But when the same file is played within iTunes (7.02) as a movie, the playback is jerky and like stop motion. The apparent frame rate is several per second. Audio playback is fine whike this happens.
Activity Monitor shows about the same level of CPU utilization in both applications Quicktime and iTunes, at around 20% on my 1.6GHz G5 Powermac.
I have Quicktime Pro if it makes a difference.
Using EyeTV (2.3.2) and playing back as a Qucktime movie also produces a clean playback.
So, the jerky playback is only in iTunes.
OS X version is 10.4.7, I'd rather not update to 10.4.8.
I've looked for preference settings and other interactions. Any suggestions?

If you search (itunes forums) you'd have found this tidbit:
I found the problem! The jerky playback in iTunes7 is caused by a conflict with the 3ivx D4 4.5.1 component found in the Library/Quicktime/ folder.
It may also be say an old DivX codec, etc. Same folder. Remove to your desktop and try again.
Also some have reported turning off the internal mic if you have one, and making sure MIDI settings are at 44.100Khz.
Give these a try.

Jerky Playback of iTunes purchased TV Shows (specifically: HEROES)

Not yet another jerky/playback thread?
Well, I feel compelled to do so since I have reviewed all of the jerky/playback threads that I could find and I have tried most, if not all, of the suggestions. Namely:
1. This thread: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303706
2. Uninstalled Quicktime and reinstalled (ver. 7.1.6)
3. Setting "waveout" for audio.
4. Tried several bit settings for audio (16, 24) along with sampling rates (44000, 48000).
5. Tried two different versions of NVidia Forceware (ver 97.46, ver 158.18)
6. Two different sets of drivers for SATA
The thing that gets me is, I've been watching HEROES all season without incident. In fact, I preferred purchasing each episode and watching it in iTunes as opposed to watching the episodes in my BeyondTV DVR (computer based). One has to conclude that SOMETHING on the system has shifted to affect this change (within the last week), although I'm out of ideas beyond the 6 listed above. I'm tempted to boot into my XP partition to see if everything is fine over there but that would mean I would have to go through the as-of-yet-unfamiliar-to-me process of deauthorizing this "computer" and hoping that my purchases shows re-download. I did this once and I lost the first 6 episodes of Heroes and even "redownloading purchased" media did not bring them back. That's a separate issue that I need to contact Apple about.
So...any ideas? Any information that I'm lacking here to help troubleshoot?

Update:
I booted over into Windows XP (SP2) and everything is fine over there. So, that leads me to the strong inclination that there is something up with the configuration on this side of the divide (Windows Vista 32-bit).
I'm now beginning to suspect some recent tweaks that were made via the nTune application. For those that don't know, nTune is a utility that allows tweaking of nVidia hardware (nForce, n4 - mobo, PCI bus, SATA, video, etc.) What I'm currently trying to research is getting the automatic tweaks that I enabled to rollback to their default settings. So far, I haven't figured out how to do this. There is an option to load a "baseline" profile from within nTune's menu however the behaviors that I noticed post-tweak are still there (difficult to explain but there are indicators that the new settings are still in effect).
I'll post back here if I am successful in rolling back the nTune tweaks and see if that makes any difference with the video playback problems I am experiencing.

Jerky playback of wmv files

Please can anyone suggest how to fix this. Medium size wmv file (128Mb). Flip4mac version 2.2.3.7 and QuickTime 7.6 (472). Very jerky playback of both audio and video with much spinning beachball.
Message was edited by: Roger Sinden

Medium size means nothing. How long is it? If it is one minute that is a really high bitrate video and the G4 may not be able to decode it fast enough.
Try this - open it, then "save As" which will save it into a MOV container (it will still be WMV video).
See if it plays back nicely. Also try a computer from more recent times.
You can see a 128 MB WMV will save as a 256MB or even bigger MOV file as the video is not compressed any more in the MOV container.

CPU spikes & jerky playback of audio or video content

I've been having a problem with the flash plugin this year. I'm not sure when it started exactly, but I'm certain that this wasn't happening during 2011.
When at a site that uses Flash for video+audio (Youtube and similar) or even audio-only playback (Turntable, Pandora, etc), I find that the flash plugin causes spikes of 100% CPU usage (on one core) and that the video or audio will pause for a moment during those spikes. The disruption is typically in the 100-500ms range.
Frequency of the spikes seems to vary over time. It's fairly typical to experience a situation where it starts off bad and the frequency of disruption lessens over the course of 30 minutes until there are no disruptions at all. If you keep using playback, it'll work its way into being bad again. You're likely to start using the flash plugin at any point on that sine wave of disruption intensity. It might start working well but slowly get worse, it might start bad and slowly get better, it might start at a tolerable level and work its way worse or better depending on if you're on the rising or falling side of the cycle.
Whatever it is, it isn't my Windows install. I switched from an AMD FX-8120 to an Intel 3930K about a month ago and this problem persisted through new hardware and a fresh install of Windows using the latest device drivers for everything. I've even tested different browsers in case it was an issue with only the non-IE plugin or with my specific browser (Opera). The issue happens in Chrome, IE9, Opera, and FF on my system. I've also tested both with and without hardware acceleration, but there is no difference.
I have to wonder if there are any known issues with particular sound cards (Xonar STX), unusual video configurations (dual Radeon 6970s in crossfire), or peripherals. Perhaps with output sampling rates (96 KHz) or security software like MSE?
Anyhow, I mention this here in the hope of either raising awareness of a problem or finding answers if this is a known issue. It's silly that playing back audio would be a challenge in 2012 with good equipment. There is sure to be a logical explanation that can help lead me to a resolution. Thank you.

Hey Tbird, I was asking the guys about this jerky playback bug here:
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3155813
It turns out this problem is very likely found in mainly computers with single-core CPUs or low-power mutiple-core CPUs. What type of CPU model is on your computer?
My advice to everyone who has this jerky or choppy or stuttering playback on Flash Player 11.2 is to downgrade back to Flash Player 11.1 for now until the Adobe guys can fix this problem which seems to be with the multi-threaded decoding engine introduced in Flash Player 11.1. Make sure you uninstall Flash Player 11.2 completely before installing Flash Player 11.1.
You can get Flash Player 11.1 in this zip file archive from the link below. Just make sure you look for the right setup folder with the right setup program file in zip file archive (For example, if you got Windows 64-bit OS, then look for win64 (or x64 for windows ). If you got windows 32-bit OS, then look for win32 (or x86 for windows)
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_11.1.102.63_archive .zip

Jerky playback of iMovie 6

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for