Section B.2. Preparing the Playground


B.2. Preparing the Playground

Creating movies with iMovie 6 is fun, but it's important to clear the decks before you dig in. Whenever you hear about people having massive , crazy, buggy problems with iMovie, the problem often turns out to be one of the two setups below:

First, if you're saving iMovie projects onto an external FireWire drive, make sure you've formatted it using the format called Mac OS X Extended. (Most off-the-shelf drives and drives formatted for Windows PCs do not come that way.) You check the format by highlighting the disk icon in the Finder and choosing File Get Info. Under the Format heading in the resulting dialog box, youll see the formatting scheme identified.

If the format isn't correct, use Disk Utility to reformat the drive (which involves erasing the whole drive). Otherwise, iMovie won't reliably save projects to the driveand you will have lots of bizarre problems. The fun may include dialog boxes that complain about file permissions, missing files, and "Icon" documents.

Second, preparing the playground also means removing obsolete third-party iMovie plug-ins (including plug-ins you used in iMovie 5) and third-party QuickTime addons. These, too, can cause no end of mysterious headaches . A red line may appear superimposed on a Theme, or imported photo may start to render, then stop and disappear. And that's just the beginning.

Fortunately, iMovie is pretty good about notifying you, when it starts up, about the presence of such older plug-ins. But whether it does or not, open your Home Library iMovie folder. There, youll find a folder full of all of your non-Apple plugins. Remove them (or move them to a different folder) until updates for iMovie 6 are available.

Several QuickTime add-ons have caused problems in iMovie 6, too, including 3ivx, Divx, and Flip4Mac. You'll find them in your Home Library QuickTime folder, or in the Computer Library QuickTime folder. Remove these add-onsor temporarily move them to some other folderand restart your Mac.




iMovie 6 & iDVD
iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
ISBN: B003R4ZK42
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 203
Authors: David Pogue

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