At last, someone has acknowledged the iMovie “Save Frame As…” bug. I was beginning to think I was crazy, because this damn thing has been annoying me ever since iMovie 3 came out back in early 2003, and I could never find any mention of this bug, though surely it must have bewildered thousands of users across the globe.
Well, iMovie 3 is widely known to be buggy. I thought I’d do my part by sharing a fix for a problem that has been messing with my mind the past few weeks.
First, the problem: I’ve encountered this a few times on different machines in different situations. Audio and video appear to capture correctly. Clips on the shelf play back both audio and video. But clips in the timeline play back video only — no audio!
The fix: Open your project file in a text editor like BBEdit. Look at the tenth line or thereabouts. You may find something like this:
AudioTrackMute: 1 1 1
And that’s the problem. It should be:
AudioTrackMute: 0 0 0
Change the ones to zeroes and the problem should be fixed. Easy. Yet I can find no mention of this solution, or even the problem, using Google. Hopefully this write-up will help someone else who encounters the same problem.
As they say, it always comes down to ones and zeros.
Hi Geeky,
I have a problem with iMovie where it terminated unexpectedly. On trying to reopen my iMovie project, it gave me the error message “Unable to read iMovie project file”, or something like that. The project file still exists and is about 44kb big. It must have been corrupted in some way. So I lost my whole day’s work because I couldnt open this file through iMovie. So I thought a work around would be to create another dummy imove project, go into the “corrupted” iMovie project file (using TextEditor) and copy all the data, and then open the dummy iMovie project file and paste all the data into it. Save the file and then copy that file over the top of the corrupted file. That way, I would have an exact replica of the iMovie project file that was corrupted, except it would be a fresh, non-corrupted version. Anway, this did not work because when I tried to save the dummy iMovie project file, it did not save it as a “iMove project file” with whatever appropriate extension that is required. Text Editor saved it as a text file with TXT extension. Even when I changed the preferences in TextEditor to NOT use an extension, so the file is saved without an extension, it is still not recognised by iMovie as being a “iMovie Project File”. You mentioned in your response to the AudioMute bug above that you somehow edited the iMove project file to make the value AudioTrackMute: 0 0 0. When you saved this file, how did you save it so it was still recognised as an iMovie project file? What is BBedit? Is that similar to TextEditor?
Any help greatly appreceiated
Kind regards
Raffi