Can you change still clip duration default setting?

Question

I create wedding videos, and at the end of my movie I add about 100 still clips as edited highlights. In older versions of imovie you were able to alter the length of still clips created in the preferences to whatever time you wanted. In this newer (better?!?) version when I have created all my still clips I have to click on each one individually to alter the time duration. The default setting is 5 seconds and I can't find anywhere that you can change this. It takes me AGES to do this individually, anybody got any ideas of a better way? Cheers.

Answer 1

I can't necessarily recommend this for it can lead to project corruption. It's possible to manually edit the text of the iMovie project file, changing the playtime duration of all your still clips to the duration you want.
1. In iMovie, double-click on one of your still clips. Write down the name of its source file. Quit iMovie 6.
2. In the Finder, make a duplicate of the project. Work on the duplicate.
3. In the Finder, open the duplicate project package. (Control-click on the project icon and choose "Show Package Contents" from the popUp menu.)
4. You'll see two iMovie project files loose in the window that opens, plus some folders. One of the project files has a tilde (~) in its name and one does not. Our goal is to edit the file that does NOT have the tilde. (The tilde file is type of backup.)
5. Launch TextEdit. (In your Applications folder.) Drop the non-tilde project file onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock.
6. Use TextEdit's search function to search for the string that defines the play-time of each still clip, now 5 seconds. For PAL, that string is "<integer>125</integer>". For NTSC, it is "<integer>150</integer>".)
7. For each still, you want to change the 125 to some other number. For PAL, the number you want is 25 X the number of seconds to play.
If the only clips in your project that play for 125 are your stills, you can safely use the Replace All command to replace all with the strings at the same time. Be sure to include the tags <integer> and </integer.
If there are others that play for 5 seconds, you'll need to examine each clip individually, using the sample name you wrote down to see if the clip uses a similar name.
8. Save the modified file and close that TextEdit window.
9. Go back to the Finder and double-click on the project package to open it in iMovie 6. If everything worked as intended, all your stills should play with a new length.
Karl