Photo Settings Grayed Out

Question

I am creating about a 20 minute photo slide show with music. Suddenly, in the middle of working on the project, the "Show Photo Settings" button has grayed out for all but those photos that have the Ken Burns effect. The only way I can get it back is to delete the photo and reimport a new photo. That could get tedious with 200 photos. Is there any other way to fix this?

Answer 1

Yes, I think you've nailed it. When we send an iMovie project to iDVD, iMovie will offer to render any UNrendered photo clips. That includes photos imported with the Ken Burns checkbox OFF. (Those imported with the Ken Burns checkbox ON are rendered by Ken Burns, so iMovie won't ask to render them again.)
After iMovie renders them on their way to iDVD, those clips are no longer editable with the Photo Settings window. So that would explain the behavior you see.
There's another problem. There's a bug in iMovie that renders the photos with very poor quality when rendering it for iDVD. Photos acquire the "jaggies". Photos with certain kinds of content — straight lines, lap siding on buildings, roof lines, power lines — can look pretty terrible.
Once those photos have been damaged, the only way to repair them is to re-import the photos.
The jaggies can be avoided by doing any ONE of the following:
1. When iMovie asks permission to render the images for iDVD, do NOT grant permission. Then iDVD will render the photos.
2. Turn the Ken Burns checkbox ON when importing the image. Then Ken Burns will render them and iMovie won't ask later. (Note that Ken Burns can be set to have no zoom or pan. It looks like a still image, but it has been rendered into a clip.
3. Instead of Sharing the project with iDVD, use iDVD to import the iMovie project to the iDVD project. (Dragging the iMovie project into the iDVD project window is one way to import it.)
Karl