How to get good quality slideshow?

Question

Hello
Im in a true war with Photoshop 6 Elements and Premiere 6 Elements to build a photo slideshow DVD to be played in a common DVD player on a LCD TV
All photos were taken at least with 6 MB size and in 16:9 format, and edited in Photoshop 6 Elements for color, brightness and contrast correction, sharpness and other common adjustments. Soon afterwards they were downsized to 1920 X 1080 pixels with Genuine Fractal 5 PSE plugin, maintaining 72 dpi. I used this relative large size intending, in the future, to use these same pictures to build a slideshow in Blu-ray HD, and Genuine Fractal was used to get the best resizing without loss of quality.
After these adjustments in PSE, these pictures were arranged in slideshow format in Phosotshop Elements itself (Create > slideshow), put the transitions and, in sequence, exported directly to Premiere 6 Elements. In PREL the clip was breaked apart for best edditing, adding here some titles, narration and exported in MPG clip.
To build the MPG clip, I used the best adjustments settings: quality 5, target bitrate 7.5, maximum bitrate 8, VBR 2 pass. These clips were later arranged together to build the disc in Encore.
I noted that, when editing the pictures in PREL6, the image were very small in Premiere Elements monitor, filling only 50% of the monitor screen, even having the pictures 1920 X 1080 pixels size, being necessary to manually increase its size to fill out the whole screen.
When playing the DVD disc in the computer, the images were great, with good clearness and details and color consistence. However, when playing this DVD in a common player on a LCD TV, the image was terrible, losing all the clearness, with discolored colors, loss of details and with jagged edges.
Did anybody already have this problem? Does some special technique or adjustments setting exist to prepare the pictures or the video clip to be presented as a slideshow in DVD on a 16:9 TV LCD?
Thank you. Any help will be welcome.
Valter - Brazil

Answer 1

I've been using Adobe Encore CS4 to author Blu-Ray discs with slide shows on my iMac.
When I import high-quality 16:9 MPEG photos directly into Encore and build a slide show using Encore, the results are terrible when viewed on a big-screen HDTV connected to a Blu-Ray player.  The colors seem off, and the resolution is horrible.  There are all sorts of jagged edges and other artifacts.  It looks far worse that a slideshow on a standard-definition DVD built using iPhoto and iDVD.
A better solution is to simply build the slideshow in iPhoto and export it as a QuickTime movie file (*.mov).  You have to play around a bit to find the option in iPhoto that allows custom settings, but once you find it you can encode the slideshow in H.264 with full 1920 x 1080 resolution.  Then you can import the resulting *.mov file into Encore as an asset, then create a timeline for it.  You basically treat it like a movie.
Encore CS4 has lots of bug in it.  For example, I just downloaded the latest update yesterday (I think it was 4.0.1).  Now, whenever I try to build a Blu-Ray disc, I get an error message.  So I had to use Apple Time Machine to restore the previous version of Encore (4.0.0.28), which works fine.
Another bug is that you can't change the title of a menu in Encore.  Encore has a very limited number of HD menus.  If you want to change the title of a menu from the generic one provided ("Our Travel Diaries", for example) to your own title ("Our 2009 Summer Vacation", for example), you can't do it in Encore.  I have to export the menu to Photoshop Elements, change the text there, and re-import it into Encore.  You can change the titles of buttons in Encore.  But not the actual menu title.  This is ridiculous.
Also, Encore isn't much good for burning Blu-Ray discs.  I simply create a *.iso image file in Encore, then burn it using Roxio Toast 10 Titanium.
Anyway, with these various workarounds, I'm able to create high-quality Blu-Ray discs with movies and slideshows that look great on my 60-inch Sony SXRD TV.
I edit my HDV movies using Apple Final Cut Pro 5.1 (a couple of versions old, but it works), then use Compressor to export the movie as an HDV 1080i60 Quicktime file, which I import into Encore, which then encodes it using H.264.
One bug I encountered with my Sony Blu-Ray player is that when I installed the latest software update, it somehow set the player to downconvert 1080i and 1080p material to 480p.  The results looked terrible, and I initially blamed Encore.  However, I eventually discovered the problem and reset the player to output everything in 1080p.  Now my home movies look great on Blu-Ray.
Anyway, Encore CS4 needs a lot of work.  Unfortunately, Apple does not yet produce any software that can be used to author a Blu-Ray disc.  When they do, I'll probably throw Encore and Premiere Pro in the trash.  The only reason I bought Premiere Pro is because you need to buy it to get Encore, and Encore is currently the only affordable Blu-Ray authoring software for the Mac that works (or, more accurately, "sort of works").  Toast Titanium claims to have Blu-Ray authoring capability, but I've tried it and it's worthless as an authoring tool (though it works great as a burning tool).
Incidentally, I tried importing my Final Cut Pro HDV movie into Premiere Pro CS4 as an XML file, which is supposed to be the best way to get it into Encore, but this method caused all sorts of problems and I eventually had to abandon it. 
It's a shame that somebody doesn't produce a simple suite of consumer-grade Mac-compatible tools that can be used for the entire HD workflow from camera to Blu-Ray disc, similar to the way in which iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD work for standard-definition DVDs.