IDVD slideshow quality

Question

I've read through several of the posts on slideshow quality and think I understand some of the basic problems with transferring slideshows to DVD for viewing on a TV but hoped someone might have a few additional suggestions...
I have been trying to get a nice slideshow put together with FotoMagico. I like the program features and interface (although their support leaves something to be desired). Like others, I'm just not satisfied with the results. I'm using old scanned b/w photos, scanned at 600-dpi in TIF format. I tried a variety of export settings. The Quicktime (.mov) is always very good but once iDVD does its conversions and burns the final product often its just bad.
My intention was that the slideshow have an 'old photo album' quality so I wanted to zoom up from a smaller image on black background to full screen (or vise versa) over a 10 second span. Many of these are particularly bad - lots of flicker or jitter - as well as murky detail in smaller view. Stripes, steps and bricks have become evil things to me. Even the titles on black background title pages are very murky, even at a reasonably large font - in fact the watermark that shows up on their demo version is really terrible on a DVD burned for TV. On the other hand, full screen shots of the same images that are zoomed in on a little further seem pretty good. My question is this: is there something in the conversion that is screwing up because of all the black background on the smaller view of the images?
Also a random thought... when recording a TV show to a home DVD recorder the images, though not as good as the original broadcast, are really quite good. And even small titles and text scrolling across the screen are easily read, while corresponding font sizes on my slideshows would be completely unreadable... and I do mean completely. Notwithstanding all that has been written on the forums about NTSC and television limitations, what gives?

Answer 1

I did get a small marginal improvement with the
DVCPRO setting. I couldn't find any gamma settings.
No, I had to batch gamma adjust my images with another program (Equlibrium's DeBabelizer although Photoshop could also have been used).
Once again, my biggest problem is with old b/w photo
scans. Certain photos are clearly worse than others.
More recent color photos appear to be much better. My
biggest problem is being fairly new at this and not
having anyone that can look at a DVD I've done and
tell me "yes, that's as good as you'll get" or "no,
something is wrong".
The best way to learn is by experimenting. You need to take a few or your problem images and try adjusting ther contrast to different levels and creating a disk image out of iDVD. Keep notes and see which images look the best.
I'm stuck in neutral trying to
find a (possibly non-existent) solution rather than
giving up and using more full screen shots, less zoom
& pan, stills, etc.
It's possible you expecitations might be too high.
Were you able to set the quality level to 'Best' in the custom settings in FotoMagico after you selected DV/DVCPRO?
Finally, back to my random thought on the TV and home
recorder, as I said television recordings of grainy,
old movies on a cheap home recorder are MUCH superior
to anything I can get with this slide show. Movement
is smooth, titles are quite readable where mine is
flickery, jerky & fuzzy. Is it actually that the big
problem is the conversion to Quicktime/.mov file. And
that although the .mov file looks fine when played
back on a computer, there is already so much loss of
image at that point, that the conversion that iDVD is
doing just is amplifying an already insurmountable
degradation of the images?
What does the quality of the DV QuickTime movie you create look like on your computer screen?
Did your FotoMagico custom setting screen look like this: http://homepage.mac.com/prof_pixel/FotoMagico.jpg