Imovie 11 is not showing the photos all phots in the preview window. it either shows as black or teh previous photo, but distorted. Can anyone help?

Question

im working on a project, and have done many before, I have just updated to the lastest Imovie update, and all of a sudden, on certain photos when I add them into the project, some of them either show as black, or show the previous photo, but distorted.
I have tried re-starting and, doing a new project with the photos that dont work in, and they work in the new project, I've also re-done the thumbnails in Iphoto as suggested on other websites, but tat dosnt work either - this is really annoying.
Has anyone come across this or know how to fix it?
Thanks

Answer 1

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.