You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
New to iMovie and attempting to take about 75 hours of old family VHS movies (mainly from the 1980-90s) and cut them down considerably in iMovie. Went through the first two hours and wrote down all the time marks (in hours/min/secs) of clips I want to save but when I am no longer in full screen mode, those time markers are no longer there. I came up empty doing a search but think I must be missing something. Any help would be appreciated.
iMac Pro
There is a time indicator in the upper middle of the timeline that should match up with the time indicator that you see in full screen mode.
I think it would be easier if you edited in the timeline view rather than full screen view. That way you could pause at the points where you want to make your cuts, do a Mark/Add marker, and write down the time. The time indicator may not be as precisely accurate as you want, but would get you pretty close to your spot. The marker that you placed would provide precision.
-- Rich
There is a time indicator in the upper middle of the timeline that should match up with the time indicator that you see in full screen mode.
I think it would be easier if you edited in the timeline view rather than full screen view. That way you could pause at the points where you want to make your cuts, do a Mark/Add marker, and write down the time. The time indicator may not be as precisely accurate as you want, but would get you pretty close to your spot. The marker that you placed would provide precision.
-- Rich
Rich, I've been successfully able to import, edit (nothing fancy; pare video down by about 70-75%, put a cover title and some simple transitions) and export (to mp4 on a backup hard drive) three VHS tapes of 1980's movies, each about 2 hours long and about 30GB in size, albeit with much googling and finding help with your answers to others' queries (such as the rendering 10008 issue) and I have about 30 more hours to go till I'm done, which I was hoping would be within the next two weeks.
They are all in .avi format. Today, iMovie and I *really* didn't get along. Each movie (large ones like above, but also some only 900MB) that I imported, only imported with a blue screen (no video) but did have audio. But each and every time I tried to do something in iMovie after importing such movie, it would totally freeze. I restarted iMovie countless times. I tried hours of things that your posts, other posts and Apple suggested (restart, reset NVRAM, deleted and reinstalled iMovie, tried a guest user, tried a new user, tried a new library, tried copying the video file to desktop and trying to import from there instead of the backup hard drive all the old videos are on, etc. Nothing worked. As a test, I tried importing all three of the movies I have successfully imported, with one working (importing with both audio and video) and two doing the blue screen thing (no video but had audio), so that didn't help me troubleshoot.
Any help you are able to give me would be appreciated very much. I just realized that perhaps I should have started a new thread for this, so I hope this is okay.
Update your iMovie to as high a version as you can.
The format .avi can be problematic. Try using the free download Handbrake to convert duplicates of your clips to H.264, Mp4/AAC. See if the converted clips work in iMovie.
== Rich
Once again, thank you so much, Rich.
I don't have any updates showing in the App Store for either iMovie (10.1.14) or my iMac (Catalina 10.15.4) so I think they are up-to-date.
My good news is that my fourth movie converted easily from .avi to .mp4 using Handbrake as you suggested, and it imported into iMovie without any issues. I spent a couple of hours going through about 55 minutes of the 2 ¾ hours of video. I normally might've left iMovie open until tomorrow, but decided that, since it had frozen constantly on me yesterday, I would exit from it while just a little way into my project – and it froze. It froze for so long (over an hour) that I did a Force Quit, although I was worried that I would lose my project, but, thankfully, it was still there. When relaunching iMovie this evening after I had to force quit it, it displayed a message about my iMovie library being damaged. I clicked on the "Repair" option and it opened normally. But, it seems like something is still wonky with iMovie. I deleted and reinstalled iMovie yesterday while having so many issues. Is there anything else I should be doing?
Many thanks!
Kay
Thanks so much, Rich, for your helpful reply. I am now on my way to getting my first clips edited.
You are welcome. :)
-- Rich
Timeline indicator on iMovie 10.1?
