iMovie runs, but very slowly and strangely

[Nickhamm]

I got Mac OS 10.4.3 (JaS patches) and iLife 06 to install on my cousins computer just fine (i am waiting to buy more compatible parts for my own PC.) Specs are:

 

Soyo P4VTE Motherboard with Supported AC'97 Audio (Left speaker only though)

Intel Celeron D 2.93GHz Processor

768MB PS2700 DDR Memory

80GB 7200RPM Western Digital HDD (Primary)

160GB 7200RPM Maxtor HDD (Secondary)

Pioneer DVD Burner (Vender Supported)

ATI Radeon 9550SE AGP 8x Graphics Card (QE and CI supported, minor mouse tearing)

Generic Supported 4 Port Firewire Card

Generic Supported USB 2.0 4 Port Card

 

I can run iMovie, but it runs very slow. I edited my systemversion.plist to say I have Mac OS 10.4.4 and changed the build number to the new iMac build number to get themes to work. I tried opening a theme and the preview ran at about 5 frames per second. I added it to the timeline of my movie and it played much better. I went to switch to my pictures librry to put pictures in my theme, and it seemed to take a while to load up all my pictures (about a 20 second lag). Once the pictures loaded, I drug them into the pictures/movie slots on the black bar. every time I drug a picture the entire system would freeze for about 30 seconds until I could select another picture to go in the next slot. Once I had all my pictures, I let the theme render and when it was done and I played it, everything had a pink tint and none of the pictures I added showed up (all the spots were still white.) Is there anyone else who is having similar problems? I hope that there is an easy fix for this, as I would love to drop using Premiere on Windows and just use iMovie.

[Nickhamm]

Okay, I went over there tonight and I foudn the root of my problem: Quicktime. I hadn't run GarageBand yet, so I hadn't updated QuickTime by installing it from Apple's website. Once I updated it for GarageBand to run, I went back into iMovie and all renders just file and mostly at full speed with only minor slow-downs here and there. iMovie is wonderful. I will work on trying out iDVD if I go back over tomarrow night.

 

So the moral of the story is to install the latest QuickTime from Apple's site before trying anything in the new iLife 06 Suite so it runs as best as it can.