Ken Burns Zoom Out Speed

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.

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. View all posts by Jeff Carlson