IMovie 11 adjusting photo duration - won't change, various times showing!
imac, Mac OS X (10.6.5), CREATING IMOVIE WITH STILL PHOTOS ONLY
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imac, Mac OS X (10.6.5), CREATING IMOVIE WITH STILL PHOTOS ONLY
I've spent two days struggling witth the same issues as raised by Angela P and Questionable Sanity. The change of clip length via 'Clip Adjustments' sometimes worked, other times didn't. I think it may have something to do with what iMovie 11 thinks is the project length and randomly chcge the clip lengths regardless of what I filled in the 'duration' box. Very frustrating indeed!
I use MacBook Pro running OS X.
We were having the same issue and played around with it. We find that if we choose the File->Project Theme, and UNCLICK the part that says 'Automatically add transitions and titles', and thus click to retain your transitions and titles (not delete them), then it appears we can now adjust the duration of the stills, though it seems to have a mind of its own and tells me what duration it is going to give the different stills (probably based on the transition used on that particular slide), but at least we can make every slide longer if we wish. We have 600 stills, so doing them manually would be a drag, and we messed with many transitions as well. So this seems to be a solution. Let me know if you try it and it works. Thanks.
i'm having the same issue. i'm seriously about to break my macbook and apple monitor and through the **** thing out the window. it's ******* me off big time. ***? i tell it to goto 2 seconds but the idiot imovie software stays at 0.7 seconds. i'm gonna hit this thing w/ a hammer when i'm done i swear
I'm into a movie myself and am finding the same issue. Ugh! This has never happened to me before and it's a real pain! I put in 6.0 and it changes it to 11.4. Has Apple commented on this anywhere??
Set first the photo length to something like 5:00 for minutes or 120s for seconds, then set the audio length to be the same.
Message was edited by: andrei.marincas
I ran into the problem after I laid in a sound track. Once the track was in, I couldn't change any of the durations.
To me it seems like somehow iMovie decides all by itself on a duration for the movie and then that becomes an unchangable default.
In other words, at some point iMovie decides that your movie is going to be X minutes and X seconds long and won't let you change clip lengths if that's going to mess up its default duration. I'm not sure how to test this hypothesis, however.
There does not seem to by any reliable solution to this problem. The best advice I have found is to experiment with entering different durations on a slide and see what result you get. For instance, on a slide show I am creating now if I enter 3.0s, iMovie changes the duration to 4.2s; if I enter 2.0s, iMovie changes the duration 3.7s. Not a great way to create, but it seems to be the only way to get close to the results you want. This is a major flaw in iMovie!!
Rather than using the Precision Editor (as some here recommend), a quick workaround I've used is to enter a duration in the Inspector that will result in a longer duration than what you really want.
Now click on the adjusted still clip so that it is enclosed in a yellow border. Drag the yellow end handle inwards to shorten the clip to the desired duration. As you do this, a small window will reveal the incrementally adjusted length. Once you have the exact duration, right-click (or control-click) within the yellow border and select "Trim to Selection" from the pop-up menu. This process will not disrupt any transitions either side of the still clip (but will shorten the clip to the desired length) - unless, of course, you shorten the clip to such an extent that the transition doesn't have enough media to work with.
TIP: In iMovie's menu item iMovie>Preferences, in the General tab, check (tick) the box labelled "Display time as HH:MM:SS:Frames". This gives you greater control when editing. When typing in durations in the Inspector, enter all individual times (minutes/seconds etc) with 2 digits separated with a colon.
John
Message was edited by: John Cogdell
I think I've found the solution. You can go to Edit > Transition Overlap > Half - "Maintain Project Duration". Now the clip length will be exactly as you set it.
For a company such as Apple, iMove is very unintuitive.
IMovie 11 adjusting photo duration - won't change, various times showing!