iMovie broken??? (and fixed!)

Recently, many of you may have witnessed a rather large number of students with iMovie "issues"...typically a variety of weirdness, anything from strangely imported clips, to software based green screen malfunctions, to audio problems...  and, most recently, the issues surrounding the use of the built-in iSight camera with iMovie (or lack there of).

Through a bit of research, we have come to understand that this is a known issue with-in apple.  Apparently their latest update actually broke some bits of functionality for the iSight camera and some of the software that uses it, like iMovie.  The malfunction is related to incompatibilities in the iSight "driver" (small bits of operating system software that tell hardware how to talk to each other and play nice with the software side of things).  From helpful article:

The latest OS X update has caused some problems with the FaceTime camera on the latest MacBook Air model, leaving certain third-party apps like Skype unable to use the camera. The problem apparently concerns 32-bit apps that use the camera, including Skype and iMovie. OS X 10.8.5 updated a particular plugin for the FaceTime camera, but not for 32-bit apps, according to a Skype for Mac engineer:The 10.8.5 update updated a CoreMediaIO plugin that accesses the MBA camera, but didn't bundle the 32-bits version of it. Other (older and newer) versions of the OS do include a universal version (32 and 64 bits), but not 10.8.5. This means 32-bits apps such as Skype or iMovie cannot load the plugin, making the built-in facetime camera invisible to these them.

I guess they are calling it "the FaceTime camera" now, instead of the iSight camera or built-in webcam....whatever the case, through the unrelenting and exhaustive detective work of Mr. Borchert, and the considerable "find and copy and paste" efforts of Mr. Dearborn (might seem like I make light of it, but it does takes considerable skill and experience to get it right, which we all know these tech guys have in spades, thankfully), we can now enjoy full functionality of the iSight camera with iMovie.  It appears that most of the other strangeness has cleared up as well, though we have not tested every scenario....that is, at least until Apple decides to break it again....har har.  Anyway, many thanks to those guys for diggin' in to find and fix the issue!

As always, run RadMind to pick up the tweak.

Thanks,

PS