iMovie 6.0 Special Report: Distortion, garbled or colored images after applying themes or effects

Several readers have noted issues where, after attempting to apply a theme or an effect to a movie, a grid of small squares will appear over the movie in the main working window, or a situation where the image inexplicably turns red, black or another color.

This problem can be caused by a long-standing bug in iMovie where an applied effect can take on characteristics from a recently created title or other text. In other words, if you recently created a text title in red, the same color will be incorrectly applied to the subsequent effect.

The following steps should alleviate the issue:

1. Undo the effect: From the Edit menu, choose Undo (or press Command-Z).
2. Save your iMovie project.
3. Quit iMovie.
4. Open iMovie.
5. Add the desired effect back to the clip.

Index:

• Problems creating PAL movies
• Distortion, garbled or colored images after applying themes or effects
• Erroneous low disk space messages
• Reverting to iMovie 5.0.x
• Excessive processor usage, fix
• Playback issues
• Problems monitoring sound through FireWire -- fixes
• Plug-in problems

Resources