Oh, my dear mac…

Just a few hours ago, I was still starstruck by iMovie.  After having previously tried to make some movies on my PC many months ago, I was blown away by how easy it is to create movies in iMovie.  The ease of clipping videos… the way you could just mouse over to see where the action was… the themes… the transitions… it was everything a video editing program should be.

Seeing how easy it was, I dived in over the weekend and put together a movie of photos and videos of the last year and a half, starting from just after my daughter turned one up to the birth of my son (my son will get a dedicated video when he turns one, just like my daughter did).  I spent about six hours on it over the weekend, getting it just right.  Even my wife was impressed.

Then, tragedy struck. I was trying to show the video to my daughter, and it wouldn’t play.  It had been working fine last night, and I hadn’t made any edits to it since. I would try to play, and just a blank screen.  No errors, just not working.

It feels a little like being strung along – it won’t dump me, but it won’t return my phone calls either.  After googling around for a bit, I learned this is what happens when an iMovie project becomes corrupted.  I found some suggestions about how to edit the project, but they don’t seem to work for iMovie 11.  And, since iMovie 11 is so new, there isn’t much technical support available for it.

The saddest part is that despite this rejection, the software is so impressive that I can’t walk away. I know I’m going to end up just recreating it.

Except now I’m going to start backing it up at regular intervals.  I won’t fall for this twice.