The stuttering problem is solved, I think, I hope, Oh I hope so!

Question

Thanks to a lot of help form people on this forum and an Apple specilist on iMovie here is what I have done.
I spent over an hour hours on the phone with a specialist on iMovie today. We ran tests to try to see what was causing the stuttering. He suggested that I try setting up another account and try to duplicated the problem in the test account. I found that impractical because I could not get to any of my sounds or movies that I had made in my profile.
Here is what I am going to try to do. I logged back into my profile and opened a movie that is stuttering. I deleated the music that I had in the lower sound track. that did not stop the stuttering. Next I opened a new movie and copied half of my voice narration into the upper sound track in the new movie. No stuttering. I copied the other half into the upper sound track, the stuttering is back. Discouraged.
Next I deleated the second half of the narration and no stuttering. I copied and pasted all but the last 9 clips of the narration and no stuttering. I saved the movie and quit iMovie. I reopened the file and NO STUTTERING. Next I will copy and paste the 59 photographs. Everything is working great, NO STUTTERS. I also copied some narration from another movie and still NO STUTTERS.
Karl Perersen described how to copy music files to a disk in the AIFF format and I have done that. I am going to finish the movie pictures, effects and narration before I put the music into my movie. And you can bet I will rename the file and make a backup.

Answer 1

I am making several movies of old family pictures that I will use to make a DVD. I have been working on this project for about a year and a half so I have used several versions of iLife. This current movie is only about 7 minutes long, it has about 60 photos and just over 100 clips of narration. the narration is my voice using the iSight camera as a mic.
I am trying to keep good records of the problems that I have experienced making these movies. Maybe this will help someone else. There have been several posts to this forum of other people having similar problems. I had no problems until I updated to iLife 6.0.2. Once I started trying to use iMovie 6.0.2 everything fell apart. The first thing that happened was that I got a dialog box as iMovie is loading that tells me that one of my video cards is not "Quartz Extreme" compatible.
My computer is one of the first Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5's that were sold. I don't remember the year. It has 2 GB of memory. I have two internal hard-drives, the 150 GB that came in the machine and I installed another 250 GB internal hard-drive. I also have a 115 GB and a 400 GB hard-drive, these are external drives. I have used three monitors since well before I bought the G5. The video card that Apple installed is a Radeon 9600 Pro, it is Quartz Extreme compatible. I had a Radeon VGA added when I bought the computer, it is not Quartz Extreme compatible. iMovie would run but the effects would not work properly.
The first problem that I had to deal with was the problem with the non-Quartz Extreme compatible video card. I called Apple, explained my computer system to a "specialist" upon his recommendation I bought another Radeon 9600 Pro video card only to find out that the board only fits in the AGP. There is only one AGP slot in the G5, all of us users should know that "Right" ? I called Apple back, got another "Specialist", he tells me he knows all about a Mac because he is a "Specialist", he says get a Radeon 9200. I will fit into one of the PCI slots and it is Quartz Compatible. I got the video card and installed the card, same problem, it is not Quartz Extreme compatible. I am a bit irritated at this point so I call Apple back and get another "Specialist". After explaining the problem he tells me that Apple does not test any of the video cards to see what will or will not work. He suggests that I call Radeon and nVIDIA since they make most of the video cards for the Mac. I learned nothing from them. Some one on the forum suggested that I disconnect the monitor cable from my third monitor. I did not think that it would work but it did. Now I can use iMovie and the effects do work. However, I am short one monitor. Once you use three you are spoiled with all of the monitor space.
Once I got the hardware to work I opened one of the movies that I had not completed before upgrading to 6.0.2. It had the "Stutters" so bad that I could no longer work on it. I opened a movie that I had completed before the upgrade, it stuttered also. I opened several others and they all stuttered. They will all burn to DVD and play just fine but I could do no more editing on them because of the stuttering.
If you have read the first posts in this discussion you know that I think that I have found a work-a-round to the stuttering problem. I hope that Apple will correct the software problem with an update before I have to redo all of my movies.
I had to start over this morning on the movie that I was working on yesterday, my narration was all out of sync with my pictures. But, it will be a good test to see if I can repeat the process and not have the stutters. For some reason if I copy and paste all of the narration at one time it has a slight stutter. So I had to copy in about thirds.