IMovie to iDVD poor quality

Question

I am trying to burn a project that I created in iMovie 4 with iDVD. It's a simple slideshow with still images and audio, only about 15 minutes long. When I play the movie in iMovie, it looks fine. When I burn it to a DVD and play it in a DVD-ROM drive the image quality is terrible. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

But now I have the image quality problem. Also, does it matter if I imported the photos into iMovie as clips instead of photos?
The only way to repair the damage iMovie did when rendering your photos is to re-import the photos. Once rendered, the flawed clips can't be fixed.
Yes, importing the photos in a way that causes Ken Burns to render the clips will avoid the problem. Once KB renders them, iMovie won't try to re-render them.
The trouble is, Ken Burns in iMovie 4 won't render the photos into clips unless 1) the Ken Burns checkbox is on, and 2) there's an animated zoom or pan. Turning on the checkbox isn't good enough. (In iMovie HD, that's not true. When the KB checkbox is on, KB DOES render the photo into a clip.)
If you don't want the animation, one trick is to use a Start zoom of 1.00 and a Finish zoom of 1.02, with a duration a second or so longer than you actually need. With those settings, all the zoom occurs at the end of the rendered clip. Trim off the last second or so, and the clip looks just like a still. A high quality still too, for the Ken Burns Effect delivers very good quality.
My iDVD project is NTSC. I'm not sure what my player is
The manual for your DVD player should say. If you live in North America, it's most likely NTSC.
Karl