Portrait oriented photos are rotated in Instant Movies

Question

When I create an Instant Movie in Premiere Elements 11 for Mac, any stills that are included that are shot in portrait orientation get rotated 90 degrees to the left and are diplayed on their sides during the movie.  They display correctly in the organizer and when viewed in Preview, but the act of putting them in an Instant Movie flips them on their sides.  I've looked through all the settings and preferences that I can find to look for a way to prevent this from happening, but I haven't found it.  I can go into the timeline and then flip the photos back one at a time, but what a pain.

Answer 1

Columnar
What do your computer resources look like? I know you are running Premiere Elements 11 Mac, but how much installed and available RAM and free hard drive space?
and
What orientation are these images when viewed at their hard drive save location?
I am strictly an Elements Windows user, but basically Premiere Elements 11 Windows and Mac operate the same. There are differences.
For this test, I used Premiere Elements 11 on Windows 7 Professional SP1 64 bit, dual core, 3.2 GHz, 8 GB installed RAM, about 6 GB RAM available, and about 1 TB free hard drive space.
I took 17 photos (sized 3000 x 4000  - 4000 x 3000 pixels) into a 1080i30 project and applied the Instant Movie Celebration. Ten of the 17 were portrait oriented 3000 pixels width and 4000 pixels height and 7 of the 17 were landscape oriented 4000 pixels width and 3000 pixels height. The photo orientation was not changed in the resulting Instant Movie. So, under those conditions I cannot invoke a basic flaw in Premiere Elements 11 Windows Instant Movie even when using pixels dimensions beyond the limits of the project settings.
Where does that leave us....to rule in or out....
1. Pixel Dimensions which are oversized for the project can cause problems even in Premiere Elements 11 depending on computer resources. As an experiment, could you resize one or twenty and see if that makes a difference in the portrait rotation even though I have no evidence for that being a factor in my Windows model today.
2. The Instant Movie and Premiere Elements media trace back to what is viewed at the hard drive save location for the photos. What does that look like?
3. I have no evidence that the 4:3 photos in a 16:9 project are at issue; neither 1 to 17 oversized for the project photos being the issue if all that is on that Timeline is combo of 3000 x 4000 and 4000 x 3000 photos. How did you make sure evaluation of the issue?
a. Did you take 20 of those 3000 x 4000 photos into a new project and apply the same Instant Movie to them and ended up with them all rotated? Or did you just remove 1 to 20 of them from the existing Timeline, leaving the landscape oriented ones and those .mov videos as is? Did you find any difference in this matter if your Timeline was without the video included?
Just some thoughts for now as I think about this some more.
Looking forward to your follow up.
ATR
Add On...What computer resources did you have for your Premiere Elements 7 where you seem to be saying that you used 4000 x 3000 - 3000 x 4000 photos under similar circumstances as now and had no problems. Assumed a Windows experience.
Add On...I did not see Nealeh post until after I had posted mine.