iMovie Not Opening

Hey people, apologies in advance for the noob-ness. First ever post!

I'm having a problem when opening iMovie. Basically, I open the programme and the icon does its bouncy thing on the dock with the blue light underneath, however nothing else happens. When I right click on the icon and select 'show all windows' all I get is a dimmed image of my desktop. The only way to quit iMovie is to select 'force quit'.


I've only had my mac 3 weeks, so it's a 13 inch macbook pro with Lion and the newest version of iLife, and everything else I assume.

iMovie was working great for the first few weeks, I made a couple of movie trailers etc, however it seemed to stop working after I imported a number of videos from 'Movies' in the finder into iPhoto, and then iMovie was creating icons for the new iPhoto movies if I remember correctly.

Anyway that's everything I can think of, any help would be really appreciated, and if this problem is better suited in another forum please let me know.

Thanks!

-Goodfella_815

Probably what's happening is that you're not waiting long enough for iMovie's main window to open. It sometimes takes a little while if you've got a lot of video in your event library.

Try opening iMovie and walking away, make a cup of coffee or something. Then come back and see if the main window isn't now open.

Hey

Thanks for the advice. I tried opening iMovie and left my mac alone for 15 minutes. I came back to a blank screen, with the usual options as before

Okay, it's almost certainly some other issue then. Let's try this: log into a different account on your Mac. If you don't already have a second account on the machine, you can make one and delete it later -- or use the Guest Account option, either will do.

Now try to launch iMovie from the second account. Does it work?

Ok, I did what u said, created a Guest account, logged in and iMovie opened fine. But of course, I have no media on that account. So is there a way to transfer that working iMove onto my regular account?

I forgot to mention before, that I have also tried uninstalling and reinstalling iMovie twice, but obviously didn't work out.

In your own account, try trashing the iMovie .plist in Home Folder>Library>Preferences. It may, or may not, solve the problem.

Hey MightyGem. I did as you said, and opened iMovie. The good - The programme opens and gives me a welcome message as if I were using it for the first time. Then it automatically proceeds to transfer the videos from iPhoto - Awesome. but then it sticks at 99%, I waited at least 30 mins but it doesn't budge, tried this twice. So close but so far! I might try your idea again but delete all my movies from iPhoto first, as I still have them in the finder. Back in 10...

Right so I did as I said I would, and it Works fine! Wowow. I'm guessing that i had too many videos in iPhoto so iMovie couldn't handle the quantity when opening up. From now on, i'll just drag the specific videos I need into iPhoto rather that storing copies of everything there. Thanks for the help guys!!!!