Editing stills with motion effects, performance questions.

Question

I am editing a video in FCE that consists solely of still photos.
I am creating motion effects (pans and pullbacks, etc) and dissolve
transitions, and overlaying titles. It will be played back on dvd
on a 16:9 monitor (standard dvd,not blueray hi-def). Some questions:
What is the FCE best setup to use for best image quality: DV-NTSC?
DV-NTSC Anamorphic? or is it HDV-1080i or 720p30 even though it
won't be played back as hi-def?
How do best avoid squiggly line problem with pan moves etc?
On my G-5, 2gb RAM, single processor machine I seem to be having
performance problems with playback: slow to render, dropping frames, etc
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Excellent summary MacDLS, thanks for the contribution.
A lot of the photos I've taken on my camera are 3072 X 2304 (resolution 314) .jpegs.
I've heard it said that jpegs aren't the best format for Motion, since they're a compressed format.
If you're happy with the jpegs, Motion will be, too.
My typical project could either be 1280 X 720 or SD. I like the photo to be a lot bigger than the
canvas size, so I have room to do crops and grows, and the like. Is there a maximum dimension
that I should be working with?
Yes and no. Your originals are 7,000,000 pixels. Your video working space only displays about 950,000 pixels at any single instant.
At that project size, your stills are almost 700% larger than the frame. This will tax any system as you add more stills. 150% is more realistic in terms of processing overhead and I try to only import HUGE images that I know are going to be tightly cropped by zooming in. You need to understand that an 1300x800 section of your original is as far as you can zoom in , the pixels will be 100% in size. If you zoom in further, all you get are bigger pixels. The trade off you make is that if you zoom way out on your source image, you've thrown away 75% of its content to scale it to fit the video format; you lose much much more if you go to SD.
Finally, the manual says that d.p.i doesn't matter in Motion, so does this mean that it's worth
actually exporting my 300 dpi photos to 72 dpi before working with them in Motion?
Don't confuse DPI with resolution. Your video screen will only show about 900,000 pixels in HD and about 350,000 pixels in SD totally regardless of how many pixels there are in your original.
bogiesan