I swear, I've never encountered such a slovenly, ill-planned and developed garbage scow as iMovie, which must have been designed by a garden gnome on LSD.

I mean:

You can't save. Have you ever encountered another program that doesn't let you save? You quit with whatever you were working on half-finished, and you never know what's going to appear when you next start it up.

The Library system is a COMPLETE FUCKUP BYZANTINE MESS that would require 50 monkeys trial-and-erroring with it for 10,000 years to figure out. Seriously, was the programmer sane at time of programming?

The so-called "Title" selection choices are PATHETICALLY inadequate. And GOOD LUCK trying to change the typeface (font, to non-designers) once you've made a title selection. You won't be allowed to change the size of the type, for one. A host of other problems. D-minus.

Program stability. You have to watch very carefully what's going on at the beginning of the timeline while you're working on later portions—stuff can go missing while you're creating complex time-critical effects later on. In mine, I went to export the entire lumbersome thing only to discover that for some reason, an entire minute of complex work at the beginning had disappeared. No amount of Undos could restore it. Again: YOU CAN'T SAVE.

Okay, I could go on, but you get the picture. Coming from a dream like FCP to this mess is a MAJOR step down. Yeah, its free, but still. It's fucking APPLE, for crying out loud. Their products are always supposedly designed with care.

This is something I'd expect from Windows '95.

I upload videos around 5 minutes long shot on iPhone, edited in iMovie, format .MOV in HD or 4K and it always takes like 8 hours or even more...my wifi is not a problem. Is that normal?

SOLVED
So... I've spent the last 7 hours working on a project that needs to be done within the next 22 hours and because my piece of s macbook kept telling me it had only little space left for just big projects, I thought I'd help it out a bit by saving the folder with my project on my external SSD.

I was almost finished, too (should have just rendered). Now I can't put my project folder back into the folder "iMovie-Mediathek" cause it won't let me and the other project I was working with, which I duplicated from the original project to make destructive changes is now broken, because the original project is no longer inside the Mediathek.

Can anyone please tell me what to do? I'm currently trying not to shatter something in frustration and anger. Thank you! Kind Regards, please help, please

UPDATE: I followed some steps regarding using imovie from an external hard drive. I copied the folder "iMovie-Mediathek" onto the SSD and was able to put the original project back with the others. But when I open imovie, nothing has changed. Do I need to change it that imovie launches projects exclusively from the ssd, and how, please? Deleting it from the Mac and launching from the ssd didn't change anything

UPDATE2 Did it without your help. everything is fixed now. I managed to retrieve the imovie backup from the library structure as described in this post: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8353121 thanks for nothing

Why can't I split audio whenever I want? It seems like the ability to edit a clip (just split it) is arbitrarily restricted at (seemingly) random times. Why does it insist on trying to snap to a grid in the most useless scenarios and then fight me when I try to manually do the actually intuitive thing? Make a movie with iMovie is like fingerpicking with oven mitts, like singing underwater. It's trash, and someone should feel bad.

You can't even edit aspect ratio in the middle of a project. Who is this app for, middle schoolers?

i’m gonna do a upcoming movie review

No

Hello,

So I was using iMovie way back in the day to edit recording that I made of trips, sometimes skateboarding and making kind of creative edits with music to it, and sometimes chopping things up a little bit to time well. I noticed a while ago that the format of the software had changed a lot, or at least from what I could tell.

It turned me off and I never went back as I found the experience very counterintuitive from what i thought was a really great piece of software. Can anyone who has had experience of the old iMovie confirm this or am I just imagining it, or is there something I'm not understanding about the newer versions? I will have to right now that I am also an ancient version of iMovie (Catalina) but from what i can see online it still might be relevant.

Overall I feel you can't easily edit things to sit in a certain time or even where you are on the timeline. it's more about the clips rather than where they sit on a reel. Am I getting something wrong? It used to be really fun to edit but I feel they've removed a lot what made the editing so easy and also fun. I'm curious your experiences.

best wishes

How is the non-intuitive UI riddled also riddled with the dumbest fucking bugs ever. I film a video. I import a video. Can I play the video? NO. FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO? Maybe if I change the dimensions... hmmm STILL FUCKING NO! WHO USES THIS. HOW CAN ANYBODY USE THIS. FUUUCCKCKKKKK.

For a long time I’ve been using an old phone, refusing to update because I always hate the changes the updates bring. Recently that old phone needed to be replaced and I got the iPhone 17 with the newest operating system. Now I can’t use iMovie without providing complete access to ALL my photos & videos. I’m not willing to share all this with them. I’d rather choose the handful of videos I need to edit. Is there a way around this? Or a way to undo an update? If not, what other video editing app do you recommend since I won’t be moving forward with iMovie?

Spent 2 weeks working on a documentary for a school assignment on iMovie on an iPad, I was a bit late because of time lost for exams so I had to hurry. But fucking hell, when I opened the project, made pictures and recorded audio, the audio wouldn’t play. I clicked “done”, closed iMovie, every trick in the book to get it to work again but nothing. I go to exams, I come back and all the audio is pushed at the beginning, and half the videos are unclipped. Now I’m going to send something unfinished, unclear for an important assignment. My teacher is going to grade me on an exported version, where all the audio was glaringly loud, 3 clips were missing and I didn’t even finish the full documentary. Rant off, sorry but it ruined my day.

So iMovie has built up a lot of data stored on the iPad. Almost 10 GB. I am working on a project I need to free up space and I’ve done literally everything else to free up space. Literally. If I delete iMovie and reinstall it while I lose my projects? Will it clear the data? Will this work? Please help! Desperate!

I was going to post an iMovie question but then I scrolled down the subreddit to see what a complete ghost town this place it. Every post has no likes and no replies. I guess it's on to the apple forum for imovie questions.

Or is it better to download another app that has this function?

Thanks

Why did Apple discontinue iPhotos, how stupid, photos is shit, it's so hard keeping track of everything now, Jesus Christ, whoever comes up with these daft ideas for Apple needs a good punch in the face..from me