iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Photo Problems

iMovie’s photo features are, in general, a delight—and they let you get mileage out of iMovie even if you don’t own a camcorder. But you may encounter some rough edges.

Can’t Edit Ken Burns Photos

Suppose you import a photo and apply the Ken Burns panning/zooming effect (Section 9.3).

Later, you try to edit the Ken Burns effect, changing its zoom, pan, or duration settings—and iMovie doesn’t apply the change.

That’s because of a bug in iMovie 6: When you import an image, the iMovie Trash bulges by about 117 KB. The program has just put your original photo into the iMovie Trash. If, later, you empty the iMovie Trash, iMovie no longer has the original copy from which to calculate the new Ken Burns settings.

(This bug applies only to photos that you import while the Ken Burns checkbox is turned on.)

The solution: Either don’t empty the iMovie Trash until the project is complete, or drag the discarded photo out of the iMovie Trash to the Clips pane.

Imported Photos Show Grey Horizontal Lines Of Static

Photos from certain camera models arrive with horizontal lines of static.

The workaround is to edit the photos in iPhoto before importing them to iMovie. Cropping a bit in iPhoto usually does the trick.

Red Tint When Importing Images with Ken Burns Effect On

BMP images—that is, files with a .bmp extension—acquire a red tint when imported with the Ken Burns Effect checkbox turned on.

The solution is to convert such files to JPEG format using Preview (or some other graphics program) ...