Huge slide shows in iMovie when imported from iPhoto.

Question

     Every year I do a family slide show of between 250-300 slides. In the past, I've created the show in iMovie. This year, I did it in iPhoto. I wanted to put a title at the front, and iMovie has some great editing features for this. I exported the iphoto slide show as movies (with music) using high quality "Display" and second highest "Large". These files are roughly 500MB and 225MB. So far so good. I started a new movie in iMovie using the 1080 HD option. I added a title at the beginning and imported the whole slide show as a single clip. That's it-nothing else. The resulting iMovie was more than 29GB! That's not a typo. The "clip" was 27.5GB. Importing the "Large" export didn't help.
     I started over and repeated the process, except that I used the DV-Wide setting to create the movie (instead of 1080HD). This time the title and slide show were 10GB. The imported slide show clip was about 9GB.This is far less but still way too big.
     By the way, in past years the same length slide shows created (not imported) in iMovie averaged 1-2GB.
     What am I doing wrong?
     Mountain Lion on a MacBook Pro, 750GB, iPhoto 11, iMovie 6.

Answer 1

Hi MGW,
I do not no how things are handled when using HDV and technical documentation is hard to find on this topic of how photo are handled using HDV but in iMovie and most non HDV video editing software the picture is always 72ppi regardless of what is was/is on the outside and the images that appear the worst are the ones with less.
On a side note I don't use iPhoto because of all the superfluous files and thumbnails it creates and it disorganises my photos according to criteria that is completely irrelevant to me. I have had these thumbnails pop up in the browser in the past primarily with any photos that existed in the library prior to any updates. With what I have been working on as of late can understand how and why this could happen.
If you scroll through the media browser dose it appear that the library you are working with duplicates itself somewhere along the line or do you see double images side by side?
What are you machine specs and please include you screen/display size and graphics card information as this is the most relevant information at this point with what you are doing.
W1