Turning Off Ken Burns Default Behavior

Jeff Carlson on March 16, 2003

It’s unclear why Apple chose to implement the feature this way, but in iMovie 3 the Ken Burns Effect (pan and zoom) is applied to every still image you import into your project. Fortunately, there are a few workarounds:

  • In the Photos pane, set the Zoom value to 1.00 for both the Start and Finish States.
  • After importing a photo (from the Photos pane, from the Desktop, or by using iMovie’s Import command), hit Command-period to cancel rendering of the effect.
  • To turn off the behavior altogether, you need to tweak some settings files. Fire up a text editor and do the following (much thanks to TidBITS reader Larry Wink for pointing this out):

    • Open the ‘com.apple.iMovie3.plist’ file in the User/Library/Preferences folder and change:

      <key>Option autoApplyPanZoomToImportedStills: %d
      </key>
      <true/>

    to

      <key>Option autoApplyPanZoomToImportedStills: %d
      </key>
      <false/>

Published by Jeff Carlson

Author, photographer, and late-nighter Jeff Carlson writes for outlets such as Popular Photography, DPReview, Creative Pro, and others, and is a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Take Control of Your Digital Photos; The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Apple Watch, and Take Control of Your Digital Storage, among many other titles.

  1. Glenn Fleishman March 16, 2003 at 9:58 pm

    I mentioned this problem (quoting you) in my column.

  3. Jeff Carlson March 16, 2003 at 10:16 pm

    I saw that, thanks for the mention.
    (See, sometimes I even actually read your Seattle Times columns! )

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