iLife '04: The Missing Manual

General iMovie Troubleshooting

Let’s start general, shall we?

Weird Inconsistent Problems

When a program’s preferences file becomes scrambled, all kinds of peculiar behavior can result. Buttons and functions don’t work. Visual anomalies appear. Things just don’t work right.

If iMovie starts having a bad hair day, suspect its preferences file. Quit the program, open your Home → Library → Preferences folder, and throw away the file called com.apple.iMovie3.plist.

The next time you run iMovie, it will automatically build a new preferences file. This file will have the original factory settings (for the options in, for example, the Preferences dialog box), but at least it will be healthy and whole.

PARANOIDS’ CORNEROf Trash and Project Corruption

As you may have read in several places in this book, it’s wise to put off emptying the iMovie project Trash until after you’re finished editing. Most people, most of the time, empty the Trash without a hitch. But in that one-in-ten-thousand case when it causes harm to your project file, it causes severe harm.

The truly paranoid, therefore, adopt a rigid protocol of safety. They don’t empty the Trash until the project is completely done. And even then, they follow these steps:

Quit iMovie. Reopen the project to make sure it opens OK. If so, you’ve escaped project corruption—so far. Quit again without saving.

In the Finder, make a backup of the entire project folder. (The duplicate will be large, because it will include the project’s Media folder.)