Updated iMovie at 3pm this afternoon. It's now 9pm and iMovie is still "Preparing media for share" (6 hrs).

Question

Earlier today I installed Maverick. This afternoon I updated iMovie. For 6 hours it has been "Preparing media for share" and I cannot use the program. Any idea what's up?

Answer 1

Okay, I think I've got it solved.  The stuck iMovie app may have been caused by a disk error or a corruption in the downloaded app, so here is how to troubleshoot it.
1. Run Apple Disk Utilities to repair any errors on your hard drive.  Restart and hold the Command and R keys down, this will start the computer from the restore partition and you can run apple disk utilities.  Select your hard drive and run both the "Repair" and "repair permissions"  This will clear up any disk errors that might be locking the program.
2. Restart. Now the drive is fine but in my case the iMovie program still locked up "preparing media for share"
So we need to rebuild the iMovie 10 app.  Notice when you go into your Applications folder, the iMove 9 is also there and should work fine as it always did before.  We will just rebuild iMovie 10.
    a. From applications, Drag the iMovie.app  to the trash.
    b. from the Movies folder, drag the iMovie Library.imovielibrary   file to the trash. This is the library iMovie  10 is building as it updates clips and projects.
   c. From the movies/iMovie Events  folder remove the "UpdatedToiMovie10" file.
   d. From the movies/iMovie Projects  folder remove the "UpdatedToiMovie10" file. (I added the word "projects" to the file name so I could retrieve it later and not be confused with the same named file from  events)
   e. for good measure, right click on theiMovie alias in the dock and select remove from dock. This links to the deleted iMovie.app
We are ready to rebuild IMovie. For good measure I restart at this point to make sure the Finder knows i removed those files.
3.  Select software update in the apple menu.  It will run and tell you that there is an update to iMovie available.  Click update and it will download and put it in the applications folder.
4. Run iMovie.app.   This time "Preparing media for share" will come up for only a few seconds and your app is responsive. Notice it shows no projects.
In the file menu, select "Update projetcs and events"
This will rebuild the library file and UpdatedToiMovie10" files.
It will take some time as you watch each project go through the update routine.
Now you should have a functioning iMovie 10 app with your iMovie 9 projects available.
I did experience a number of audio files that show up in iMovie 10 in red, meaning they did not convert properly. However, locating the audio file on the hard drive and dragging it into the iMovie project worked fine and I deleted the non-working red audio file.
I did experience a few clips that also did not make it from iMovie 9 and iDvd projects.
The good things is that you now have two side-byside iMovie apps and you can always go back and launch iMovie 9 and work on projects that did not make the cut.
This was a major rewrite of iMovie and updates are planned that may make this go smoother than it did for some of us early adopters.
Typos edited by: iPacific