Make Sure You're On the Latest Patch 3.0.3

Fixes in 3.0.3

• Problem with unexcepted quits and crashing with French language set identified by Apple
• The image quality of imported stills is MUCH improved. Although the playback quality in iMovie hasn't changed, the playback of the final product is considerably better. You can see the difference by playing the .mov file inside the project folder. In the same project, identical images imported with iM302 and iM303 show a huge improvement in quality. Way fewer jaggies in iMovie303 imports. The improvement in image quality shows up on a DVD too (although not in the iDVD preview.) Some of us will be re-doing projects to benefit, I suspect.
• Ken Burns zoom much smoother, although not as good as it could be. Some zooms/pans are "shakier" than others. Zooming with no pan helps. Some pans look better than others; we'll have to experiment. (Perfectionists may still prefer creating their pans and zooms in Still Life or Photo to Movie, then importing into iMovie. The image quality is still better than Ken Burns.)
• Ken Burns effect can now be disabled with a checkbox. The checkbox unchecks itself automatically after importing with Start and Finish zooms set to the same. See next. (It shouldn't unset itself, in my opinion. You have to turn it back after each crop.)
• To crop an image, turn on Ken Burns, set the Start button to the zoom you want, then Option-click the Finish button to apply the Start settings to the Finish. (That also turns off the Ken Burns effect after Applying.)
• Preview now works without having to resize the window. It still has bugs, however. Occasionally the preview shows up as a thumbnail in the video display.
• Ken Burns can now import Photoshop files without making them fuzzy.
• I THINK the titles are better, but I'm not sure. Sharper. Smoother. (But see below.)
• Imported stills are darker than before. The colors are richer. The image now matches the image viewed in other apps. 

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Not Fixed:

• Frames saved as a JPEG are still distorted, losing about one inch along the right edge. PICTs are fine.
• Ken Burns pan still "sticks" between iMovie sessions. Doing a crop with the zoom set to 1.00 unsets it if you carefully drag the thumbnail to remove the pan, but that's not terribly precise.
• Titles are still off-center to the left. Better tho?
• iMovie still exercises unexpected control of timeline scroll and selection. After certain edits, the timeline scroll still goes off to a place I don't want to go.
• iMovie still occasionally refuses to recognize which clip is selected. Ken Burns sometimes refuses to unselect an image in the Photo pan when I select a timeline clip, making it impossible to use Ken Burns on a clip (which I just edited with KB.) - Karl P.

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Notes and Hints:

• Make sure and run a Disk Check

  1. Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/)
  2. Select the Mac OS X startup disk in the left-hand column
  3. Click the First Aid tab
  4. Click Repair Disk Permissions
     
• Clearing out your caches has helped many and you will gain disk space back too.  Click here to download Cache Out X. Make sure to use the system clean! It looks like this:
• Users are reporting a speed increase, fix a number of problems, including launching and even importing by closing all apps and deleting all iMovie plist files in Home/Library/Preferences.  The files are com.apple.iMovie.plist and com.apple.iMovie3.plist. also iMovie Preferences if in existence.
• Still have speed and reliability problems?  Remove all your plug-ins, even the old Apple supplied ones, and run iMovie without them to see if it makes a difference.  Also check in with the vendors to see if they have updated their plug-ins to take advantage of iMovie.
• Extracting the audio out of the tracks and locking the audio to the video has solved some folks issues with audio out of sync and there are more solutions here.
• Your system HAD BETTER be correctly configured and working properly. Some Tips:
  1. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities)
  2. Type: sudo sh /etc/daily
  3. Press Return
  4. Enter your Admin password when prompted, then press Return
  5. Quit Terminal when the task is complete

IF ALL ELSE FAILS and iMovie is still launching slow

Update Your Prebindings by:

1. Open up Terminal (Applications/Utilities)
2. Type: sudo update_prebinding -root /
3. Press return
4. Enter your Admin password when prompted, then press Return. Wait... (you will see text-galore scroll by for about 10-20 minutes)
5. Quit Terminal when the task is complete.

Please be sure and GIVE APPLE LOTS of feedback.