Vanishing iMovie Audio

December 2, 2008 1:47 PM

My video project is due in 2 days, and out of nowhere, a bunch of my audio files in iMovie have become corrupt (I think). Is there any way to fix this, short of re-recording them?

I've been making a video collage of clips of Obama, McCain and Palin for a group project. Just now when I opened iMovie, though, lots of the dubbed voice clips (but not all) that worked yesterday seem to have gone quiet. The clips in question no longer show the standard audio output graph image, but instead have text saying "Voice 44" etc. I can't undo any changes in the project, and my only backup isn't useful as it was made before lots of the clips in question were recorded. Should I risk a restart? Is this hopeless?

I am using one of the old white macbooks with OSX 10.5.5 and iMovie HD 6.0.3

posted by rosken to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Is your iMovie project file borked, or the audio files? You can check this by opening up the audio clips in the Finder. If the audio plays fine, you could try reimporting them into a new project.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:58 PM on December 2, 2008

I think that it's the audio files that are the problem, they won't play in either quicktime (which says "this is not a movie file") or VLC (which offers the slightly more informative "mp4: MP4 plugin discarded (no moov box)").
posted by rosken at 2:05 PM on December 2, 2008

If your audio files are corrupted, try replacing them with a backup of the audio files, or re-record them and re-insert them into your project.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:13 PM on December 2, 2008

There isn't any hope of saving them? I don't have backups for most of the files, and re-recording them will be really difficult in the space of two days.
posted by rosken at 2:17 PM on December 2, 2008

Try loading the audio in a different app. I'd probably try Audacity. See if it can make heads of tails of the data. Maybe convert it to something else.
posted by roue at 2:42 PM on December 2, 2008

I've just tried Audacity, and it crashes when I try to load one of the silent audio files.
posted by rosken at 3:39 PM on December 2, 2008

Can you put one of the audio files online somewhere? Maybe the data is fine and there's something wrong with your computer? Have you tried moving the project to a different Mac?
posted by roue at 7:11 PM on December 2, 2008

I was having a similar problem with a video project and it turned out that I didn't have enough free space on my hard drive. iMovie apparently needs extra disk space to make temporary files, without enough space, it seemed like I had lost the audio. So, after I moved some files off to an external drive, iMovie worked normally again. I hope this helps, good luck!
posted by GoshND at 9:39 PM on December 2, 2008