Fellow author Jim Heid is working on his Macintosh iLife ’04 book and wondered if I’d encountered the following problem: when you zoom out in a photo, the zoom affect starts slow and then ends quickly and abruptly. He writes:
- There seems to be a problem with the Ken Burns effect in iMovie 4: If you zoom out on a photo, the resulting move is often very awkward: the zoom-out begins very slowly, then very rapidly ramps up. The move is not at all what iMovie displays in its preview monitor.
This problem is particularly noticeable in short clips — a few seconds long, for example. It’s ugly and makes zooming out pert-near unusable.
But where there’s a will, there’s a workaround: Rather than zooming out on a photo, zoom in. Then, select the resulting clip and choose the Advanced menu’s Reverse Clip Direction command. You’ll get a much smoother zoom-out.
Update: Jim says that iMovie 4.0.1 fixes the zoom out speed problem.
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 
I sill have the issue when having a slide moving in from the left side at 1.53 going to 1.00 it is slow to start and races at the end. The timing per slide is 8:13, any other ideas?
Regards
JgA
iMovie 4.0.1 does not seem to fix this bug, at least on my system. But the workaround is great… thank you.
Hmm, I’m getting mixed results. Reproducing James Arzente’s settings, I see the problem. But taking the same photo and just doing a zoom out (versus moving the picture into the frame, which is how his description sounds), I get a smooth ending. However, the start of the clip does a quick jump over a few frames, making the beginning of the effect very choppy.
The Ken Burns error has nothing to do with the direction of the zoom. There seems to be a bug with the Ken Burns effect. If you use the “Reverse” button in the Ken Burns dialog box the error occurs. Pressing the “Reverse” button again solves the problem.
Also, if you’ve pressed the “Reverse” button it will affect all subsequent clips created using Ken Burns. Hope this helps.
/Fred