Photo pixelating in iMovie

I extensively have tried to resolve the following issue via apple web site searches, two phone conversations with apple, and many, many varialbe of "self tests" to mini dv, idvd, quicktime, etc. Tired directly dragging photos into iMovie, different export options from iPhoto, etc.
When I refer to picture quality issues, I am referring to the final output of the project from iMovie HD 6/iDVD to a DVD and to miniDV tape as viewed on a tv screen.
iMovie project for School's sports team. Photos shot with Nikon D80 10.2 MP digital SLR at the camera's full resolution. Project's photos imported from iPhoto to iMovie. The first section of game photos and titles are sharp - other photos of team bonding, etc. are very pixelated. Also, the titles' motion is jerky. I have found that getting "info" of the game action photos states the file size as 17.6 MB. That size is consistant on all the sharp photos. The team bonding photos only state 117kb in size from the "info" select. Also, today I tried importing the same game photos into iMovie that were sharp - they now only read at 117kb in size.
I am guessing at this point, the small file size is the cause of the very pixelated final output of the photos in the project. The questions are...
Is the pixelating of some of the photos due to the now small file size?
Why are the photos only entering iMovie in a small file size of 117kb?

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.
I am the one who took the picutres with the Nikon D80 10.2 MP Digital SLR, as mentioned in the original message and am fully aware of the photos' resolution.
I loaded the photos from the camera to two places - 1st place was a folder on the desktop - the 2nd was straight to iPhoto. I like iPhoto for its photo organization features. I shot jsut under two thousand photos for the season - narrowed that selection down to approx. 300 photos fo rthe entire project. The photos were shot at the camera's's max. resolution. The info of the images size is 3872 x 2592. As I had mentioned, I tried many options of imports / exports, etc. All the photos are from the same source. I created a new iMovie project - imported a batch of the photos that originally were sharp at the beginning of the project and were 17.6MB in file size. The result was the pixelated 117 kb "finished product" in the new iMovie project. I even "reimported" the same photos into the clip pane of the original iMovie project of sharp photos - they also only loaded as 117 kb sized files. All the photos in the project were initially import through the media window within iMovie, including the series of photos that were sharp in the project.
The photos can be opened with iPhoto, Photoshop, Preview, and others. All the images are razor sharp.
I can only deduce that there is a preference setting of some kind or other cause somewhere that at some point between importing the first series of photos to the middle set of photos has changed resulting in the small pixelated photos in the project.
I appreciate your imput thus far. I look forward to any other ideas you may have.

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