KEN BURNS imovie clip timing PROBLEMS!!!

Question

I'm having some trouble adjusting the timing for pictures that I have put the Ken Burns effect onto, in imovie. I have selected all the clips to be 4 seconds long. Then I have selected the Ken Burns clips to be 4 seconds long as well, but they either have to be RENDERED in order to change the time (and this, I've heard messes up the quality of the pic making it "jagged") OR it only allows the picture to be set at it's pre-given RANDOM lower than 4 second time.
Make sense? PLEASE HELP! I'm about sick of imovie with all the problems I've had.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Then I have selected the Ken Burns
clips to be 4 seconds long as well, but they either
have to be RENDERED in order to change the time (and
this, I've heard messes up the quality of the pic
making it "jagged")
You may have misunderstood something important, Smiley, so I want to correct it. Ken Burns does NOT add jaggies to images. It actually INOCULATES the image from getting jaggies later.
The jaggies are added when you press the Create iDVD Project button (in the iDVD tab). That's when iMovie offers to render any unrendered photos -- convert them to video clips. If you grant permission to render, the jaggies get added to those clips.
Ken Burns renders images beautifully. The rendering routine iMovie uses later adds the jaggies.
OR it only allows the picture to
be set at it's pre-given RANDOM lower than 4 second
time.
The user interface for configuring Ken Burns settings is confusing and sometimes buggy. Until you figure it out, it sometimes appears to have a mind of its own. For what it's worth, I've never seen KB apply random durations to a group of images, and it's not a complaint we see here. So my guess is you're doing something inconsistent with how the Ken Burns user interface likes to do things, or you've bumped up against a bug.
One bug is that the text boxes in Ken Burns are quite unreliable. It's best to use the sliders to set the duration and zooms instead of the text boxes. The duration slider is more reliable than your typing the duration in the text box at the end of the slider, for example. If you use the text box, remember to hit the tab key after entering the text. And, of course, be sure to use the sec:frame format, e.g. 4:00 or 4:22. If you type the numbers differently, iMovie will probably do something unexpected.
One of the interface anomalies occurs when the Ken Burns checkbox is on when you select a photo in the iPhoto list.Then Ken Burns does a preview dance in its little thumbnail image, with animation. As that animation runs, changing any Ken Burns settings will almost certainly fail. You will probably accidentally set a feature you didn't intend.
Here's why: As the animation progresses, Ken Burns switches from the Start position to the End position. If you click on a photo in the list, then reach up to set the Start position, you'll probably unintentionally set the End position. So always wait for the preview to finish before setting anything.
Another confusing (but useful) feature is that Ken Burns always applies the features of your last-clicked-on Ken Burns clip to the upcoming import. So if you pre-set your Ken Burns features, THEN click on a previously-imported Ken Burns clip, the Ken burns settings will change from YOUR settings to the settings for that clip. (That's immensely useful, for it lets us apply the settings of a clip we like to one or more photos we want to import, but it can be very confusing.) So if you have manually configured some settings for the next import, do NOT click on a clip before importing that image.
Another bug: if the Ken Burns checkbox was OFF when a photo was imported, clicking on that clip does NOT correctly re-display the settings for that clip. Ken Burns doesn't correctly show the pan or zoom. If you Update the clip with a new duration, the pan and zoom of the new clip won't be correctly applied.
I don't know if any of that helps you figure out what's going on there, but hopefully so. If not, describe EXACTLY the steps that cause the problem to occur so others can test it.
Karl