I imported over 4000 hi-res images into imovie. Preview screen is black.

I just imported 4774 images with dimensions of 3264 × 1832 (pretty huge, I know). After the 3.5 hours it took to import, the preview screen was dark, and only about 1/3 of the image thumbnails worked (the first third). I moved on anyway, and made all of the images .1 seconds long (it's for a time lapse if you hadn't guessed). So I exported the movie, and the final .mov file was still black. Did I break iMovie? My computer has 8gb of ram and is running on a SSD, so I don't think my computer is the problem.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.

Did you by any chance upgrade your Mac OS from version 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to 10.7 (Lion) during the time you were working in iMovie on all these projects?
If not, start by deleting the iMovie Preferences file.
Go to the Desktop
Hold down the Option key and choose the Go Menu > Library
Go to Preferences > com.apple.iMovieApp.plist
Move the .plist file to the trash and restart iMovie
See if the Project files react any differently. Failing that try doing a Repair Disk Permissions:
Restart the Mac, hold down the Option key continuously until 2 hard drive icons appear
Choose the Recovery Volume as your startup disk and let it run until you see the Desktop
Choose Disk Utility from the Recovery Menu
Run Repair Disk Permissions in Disk Utility
Reboot the Mac and when you see the Desktop appear launch iMovie
See if the Project files are the same or different. Next step after this is to one at a time take the Project folders out of users/me/movies/imovie projects. Move one to the desktop and start iMovie. Try skimming the projects that acted up recently. Moving one project at a time might help isolate which project may be causing problems. You can also place project folders back in their original location after doing this testing and iMovie will recognize them on the next relaunch. It won't hurt anything.

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