IPhoto Slideshows: major loss of quality when passed to iMovie or iDVD

Problem: Slideshows created in iPhoto and exported to a Quicktime movie lose quality when exported from iMovie or iDVD.
I've read through many threads in both the iMovie and iDVD forums, and I've done a lot of testing to find the source of my frustration. Now I want to spell out my findings and see how they compare with what others know of this process. I'm posting the thread in this forum because iPhoto seems to be the common denominator.
I create slideshows in iPhoto, adding Ken Burns effects to each photo individually. I then export the slideshow as a Large (640x480) movie. The resulting movie looks good when played in Quicktime.
I import the Quicktime movie into iMovie, add some music and themes and then export it. No matter how I export it, the quality greatly suffers.
I try bypassing iMovie and import the iPhoto-created movie directly to iDVD. I burn the project and the quality of the video suffers.
As a final test, I create a similar slideshow in Photo to Movie, using pan and zoom effects and music, just like the iMovie project. I export the slideshow to a Quicktime movie and it looks great. I send that movie to iDVD and burn the project -- the quality is much better.
All this testing tells me that iPhoto's exporting of the slideshow creates some problem when running the movie through iMovie or iDVD. At first I thought it was just the conversion of the video to Quicktime movie and then it being encoded again by iDVD. The thing is that Photo to Movie also creates a Quicktime movie and the result after iDVD is still good. I don't have a real technical explanation for what's going on, but surely somebody does!
Sorry for the length of this post, but I needed to lay out all of my findings to try and get a good discussion going. Anyone have some insight into all this?
PowerMac G5 1.8 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Running into the same problems with video books. I created some video books (using iPhoto's book feature and exporting to iDVD) and the Quicktime files don't look good.
However, I have created some slideshows prior and didn't run into any quality issues. I used the Share - Send to iDVD, but that shouldn't change anything.
If you hear how to resolve video quality issues, I'd love to know. I haven't yet burned my video books to DVD (just exported to QT), but I'm hoping on the TV from 10+ feet away it will look fine.

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