Why is Audio Lock in iMovie4 not effective?

Question

In iMovie4, I have locked audio tracks to video clips. These video clips were imported as photos, but I understand that iMovie4 considers them video clips. Well & good.
The locking is a farce. If I increase the duration of a video clip in the Timeline, the clip expands accordingly, but the audio clip, supposedly locked to it, doesn't go with it. So, I have to waste hours going back thru my slideshow, realigning my audio clips with the video clips. Am I missing something, here?

Answer 1

Guess I don't know what you mean by Direct Trimming,
as it doesn't appear as a command under any of the
menu headings, either in black, or grayed out. Do you
mean moving the handle at the end of an audio clip
inward to trim the clip, as I did? I can't understand
why the time for the clip that appears above the
timeline didn't register the decrease in the clip's
duration after I had shortened the clip. Maybe I
didn't actually shorten the clip, as far as iMovie4
was concerned.
Yes, Direct Trimming is what you describe, where you grab the end of a clip and drag it. I suggest trying again. Here the displayed duration of the clip DOES change.
Note that this workaround requires dragging a VIDEO clip that precedes the locked audio clip, not an audio clip. When I do it here, the audio clips after it return to their proper locked position.
There's another issue I neglected to mention: When I
play either a segment or the total program, the
playhead proceeds jerkily (Is that a word?), and the
audio is garbled. However, when I burned a DVD of the
program and ran it on my TV, it was perfect, except
for some changes I noted & which I'm trying to make.
It looks like the only way I can know the end result
of my efforts is to burn DVD's, rather than playing
the program on iMovie4.
That sounds a lot like the "stutter" problem described here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2597033#2597033
It usually occurs because an iMovie project has lots of audio clips. "Too many" varies from project to project. The problem can also be caused by one imported iTunes song.
Workarounds for both causes are described in that thread. It also describes how to test for the problem.
Note that although the topic was written for iMovie 5/6, the problem exists in older versions of iMovie too.
I must also note that a major problem is that once I
play a segment of my program that I've changed to
see the effect, iMovie 4 keeps going after I've
clicked the play button or the space bar to stop it.
The only way I've been able to stop it is to exit
iMovie4 and select Save before closing.
Because of the stuttering, iMovie may be unable to "see" your mouse click. It's too busy trying to play the project. Fixing the stutter should fix that too. The stutter causes many user interface problems. Essentially nothing works as it should. The stutter may also be causing difficulties with Direct Trimming.
When you eliminate the stutter using one of the workarounds everything should return to normal.
Karl