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Video freezes when exporting to Full Quality

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[Background: I've been working on a video project in iMovie HD that I'm doing in pieces - exporting each section of the video at full quality when it's done, so that later I can put them all together in a new project.]

Lately I've been having major problems exporting to full quality Quicktime files. The exported video freezes a few frames in, though the audio continues to play normally. This does not happen if I save it to a smaller quality, say, Web Streaming.

I'm having trouble seeing a pattern in how/why/when this happens, too. I have successfully exported movies to full quality both before and after movies that export incorrectly. The first project that had this happen, I decided to reassemble bit by bit to find out if something specific was causing the problem. Turns out that Full Quality exporting started having this problem if I had added titles. After jumping through something like 50 hoops - exporting little pieces, reimporting, exporting just the titles, etc., etc - I managed to work around the issue. Bit of a headache but all seemed to be well.

BUT, the frozen video problem soon happened again. The next time I had this trouble exporting, there were no titles in the project at all, and the problem instead occurred once I added music. So there does not seem to be a pattern within iMovie itself. This makes me think it's either a Quicktime problem or something to do with my computer itself. I have 2GB of memory, 37GB of space left on my hard drive, and I'm running Quicktime 7.4.1 and iMovie HD 6.0.4 on 10.4.11.

Please help! I'm on a bit of a deadline, too. This is driving me crazy!
 
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What is the file size of the video at full quality? It might just be too big for you to play back smoothly on your mac. By full quality do you mean you're exporting at Animation compression?
 
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Thanks for the reply! The file is about 26mB, which seems to me to be much smaller than it would be if the video was intact.

By "Full Quality" I mean that that's the label given in iMovie, so whatever the defaults are in that setting. I've also tried Expert Settings on H.264, and after your post on Animation, and neither of those works either.
 
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2011 MBP, i7, 16GB RAM, MBP 2.16Ghz Core Duo, 2GB ram, Dual 867Mhz MDD, 1.75GB ram, ATI 9800 Pro vid
Try Apple Intermediate Codec also.

I'd say look for missing frames, but I don't think iMovie can analyze the file, so it would have to be a manual search.
 
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stardust121, were you able to solve this problem?
xstep: what is apple intermediate codec? (i'm not very knowledgable, so you will have to spell out the steps for me)

I have the exact same problem and am still trying to resolve it. I found 2 other threads about it, but so far they haven't helped me:

Apple - Support - Discussions - exported movie freezes at 30 seconds, ...
Apple - Support - Discussions - Exporting full quality problem - image ...

More info: (macbook, processor 2GHz, memory 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 12 GB of free space on hard disk, Mac Os X.4.11, iMovie HD 6.0.3, quicktime 7.6.2)

Steps I have tried at others suggestions:
-repaired permissions & verified hard disk (did not need repairing) with disk utility tool, opened garageband and played a note then closed it, deleted iMovie pref file, made sure screen was on million colours
 
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Apple Intermediate Codec is a codec available when exporting using the QuickTime export option. See my iMovie Export guide to see how you get there.
 

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