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iMovie doesn’t save edits

I use iMovie and the Magic Movie function on my iPhone 14pro. I am sorry but this is nerv wrecking: I make simple edits and cuts but iMovie reverts every change to the origonal… no matter how often I change something. I cannot export my version… Is this Apple quality? Wtf is this Apple? We pay over 1k for this piece of ****!!!! Het this sorted!

Posted on Dec 10, 2023 4:04 AM

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Posted on Jun 8, 2024 12:40 PM

Having the same issue but on a 15 Pro.

13 replies

Jan 19, 2024 2:32 AM in response to attilathehungarian

Yes, I totally agree — I've lost hours of work repeating my edits and trying to solve this one. I totally get the concept of a "Magic Movie" is to more or less 'automagically' through machine learning etc. create a beautiful movie for you: you just give it some clips, pick a theme ("style"), some music, and voila!


However, there are controls for tuning and refining not just the theme and so on, but individual clips (with the clip duration displayed down to 1/10th of a second)... that allows for some pretty fine tuning. Why include such features if it only works half the time as @attilathehungarian points out (and for me it's about 10% of the time)!


What's most baffling however is when scouring the community boards, Reddit, Google, etc it seems this is not a common complaint. I spent probably 6-8 hours searching for someone to have this exact same issue before I found this post. So, it makes me wonder if it only occurs under certain use conditions.


For example, just 30-min ago I found a thread wherein Rich was trying to help someone a few years ago with recovering iMovie backups on his Mac. The (insightful) suggestion was to always keep your projects local (not in eg. iCloud drive). I tried that with Magic Movie, but alas no luck — the edits were still not saved when exporting and re-importing the project locally (and obviously exporting / importing the project itself was just my feeble workaround attempt at preserving my edits, since iMovie is constantly auto-saving changes to a project).


@attilathhungarian, did Apple confirm or give any indication they considered this a bug?

Jan 19, 2024 3:03 AM in response to edhlee

Apple service made a promise to send my feedback (video and text) to the "devs" in Ca USA and return with some answers, because service EU had no idea. They never came back.

They recommend to do the updates and reinstall the app, I did it all. DOES NOT work!


Update: iMovie stopped working. I start a project, upload some photos and videos and it just dies.

I checked on the new 15pro. iMovie is a lot smoother. and of course.. it works...


Apple just removed my previous answer/comment because it was nontechnical... Wtf Apple?!

This is getting ridiculous...


Jan 19, 2024 3:30 AM in response to attilathehungarian

Geez... how can they have botched so many of the delightful things that made their products so desirable?


Just so I understand... when you use iMovie (including editing Magic Movies) on the latest iPhone model (15 Pro) you don't have the same issue with your edits getting lost / discarded? I did wonder if there was a performance reason behind some of this strange behavior.......

Jan 19, 2024 6:47 AM in response to edhlee

Yes, and this is sad...


I went to an Apple store and tested the 15 Pro I checked iMovie with some video and photo material. It works. Of course, it has to. I myself have a 14 Pro, 7 month old, which is not old and the performance is not a lot less than on a 15 Pro. Still I have the issues.


My phone has other strange things too. E.g. Some contacts I was not able to add to the favs. I had to delete them first then re-add and save again to favourites. 3x times. and battery seems (based on my subjective feelings) to loose power... come on...

Apr 24, 2024 4:30 AM in response to Smush324

It's definitely the App! It has bugs.

I have been deleting iMovie and reinstalling it several times, but it did not help.

I wanted to avoid fully reinstalling the whole iOS, but that seemed to be the only option.

First I tried a full reset of all factory settings. You lose many personal settings and its really difficult to reset everything but I gave it a try.

And it solved the dying problem, iMovie doesn't die anymore if I start a project but still has the editing issues.

I guess I will use another App..


iMovie doesn’t save edits

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