Missing from the "Missing Manual"; any ideas on this one?

Question

Greetings Wizards, Gurus, Freakazoids, and anyone else willing to share their wisdom,
I recently upgraded to iMovieHD (5.0.2) and have come across a few anomolies; some harmless and some downright debilitating (and stupid, I might add), for instance:
What is this @%#$ "Updating Files - This could take awhile" message?! It interrupts every process. Sometimes it's just during an edit, but earlier today it interrupted a capture and blew the whole clip (it was a 10 minute clip for time lapse). I had to go back and start over.
Fortunately, it didn't take "awhile", but in previous sessions it really did. Sometimes 5 minutes or more. What is this process and how can one avoid/work around it?
Perhaps related, perhaps not, but I was working with large clips today (for a time-lapse project; many 5 - 10 minutes long) and found that it was nearly impossible to scrub through these clips without invoking the Spinning Beachball Of Death. Now I'm guessing that it may have something to do with a really long clip being scrubbed too fast, but here's the issue: I have a 2.5GHz DP G5 and it can't seem to handle the same thing I was able to do with my trusty old 450MHz G4 running iMovie 3.03. I've never had problems like this. In addition, it doesn't seem to depend on length; I can scrub 10 minute clips fine and then it'll hang up on a 6 minute clip. Next I'll try a 12 minute clip - no luck. However, it always has problems with the same clips.
And they call this an upgrade?!......don't even get me started on the whole "non-destructive editing" thing....
Any ideas?
In the immortal words of James Brown,
Please, Please, Please, Please,..........help a brother out.
Thanks,
Chris
PPC G4 450, 768 MB RAM + G5 2.5DP, 512 MB RAM   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Wow. That's brutal. I think I would have scratched my eyes out by then.....
We do our own letterboxing, so we shoot 4:3 with tape over the monitor (or the camera's LCD - really) and frame for that. (we call it "ghettoboxing" - I suppose we'll have to stop calling it that at some point.)
Anyway, it's easier to deal with in post because we never have to worry about squeezing or unsqueezing, etc. It always looks right, and well, there's a certain amount of caché when one walks around with a $4000 camera with tape stuck all over the monitor....
Even classier, I have a china marker in the edit suite so I can draw the lines on the monitor and line up the letterboxing. Nothing but the best for our clients....."Wait, we have clients?! Where?!"
If you've got a lot of clips it can be a drag, but I usually select a screen-length's worth in the timeline and render the letterbox on all at the same time, scrub forward and do it again to the next batch. The settings usually stay the same from the last time you used the effect, so it works out.
The more I think about it, the more I think it has something to do with the drop-frame time code. I don't think the Quicktime engine is able to deal with it effectively, especially if there are dropouts on the tape. Which in this case, ther seemed to be on a couple of clips.
Not sure why 16x9 would cause an issue, unless it's somesort of rendering or conversion issue. When you view your clips back onscreen, are they squeezed, or does IM accomodate the format and stretch the preview monitor?
- Chris
PPC G4 450, 512 MB RAM + G5 2.5DP, 512 MB RAM   Mac OS X (10.3.7)