Imovie crops my video after I move it to the project

Before I do that, I discovered that there is a cropping icon showing on the clip in both the event and project windows. Every effort I’ve made to choose “fit” instead of “crop” still results in that icon showing. The clips that do not have a problem are (not surprisingly) O.K.

Here are two screenshots. My screen name is "dengrey17":

http://www.flickr.com/photos/6029/

And these clips were captured from tape? And appear with the crop icon in the events browser as well?

The original source of the raw footage was my own Canon ZR900 Mini DV (Tape) Camcorder. It is non-HD. (Please excuse me but I'm very new to videoing anything and I only just started to use iMovie.)

That clip from the project window I show in the screen shot with the crop icon also appears with the crop icon in the event window. But, when I play the event window no cropping takes place. When I play the same clip (which is all but 2 seconds of the project!!) in the project window, the cropping happens.

I'm assuming you've set the clip in the events browser to fit as well. Very strange. I don't know how or why this would happen. You might have to recapture the clips.

I think I found the answer. "Stabilization" was being applied to that clip. I turned it off. The clip is acting the way I would expect now. I wonder if that solves the problem the original user, who started this thread, had.

Ahh....stabilization! Good pick up dengrey! It's often the simplest things that cause the problem - we should have thought of that. There's always a tendency to look at the more obvious culprits when cropping occurs, such as aspect ratio. The Stabilization function in iMovie averages out the pixels (in layman's terms), which causes the cropping effect, together with a slight loss in quality (sharpness).

John

Thanks for the help. And thanks also to AppleMan1958 and Tom Wolsky. As frustrating as this was, I learned a few things along the way.