Is iMovie the software I need?

Question

Instead of me spending hours reading through the specs of iMovie, iDVD, Quicktime and others, I thought I'd post here initially, to find out what program I should be looking at. Here is what I want to do:
1. Prepare a presentation of member's photos (slides, prints, digital) for a camera club. The presentation will consist of, say, 200 images and last about 30 minutes.
2. The time that each image is on the screen will vary from about 6 seconds to 10 seconds.
3. I only ever want to use a simple dissolve (2-5 seconds) between images. Fancy wipes are not needed.
4. Sound-editing facilities within the software would be useful but not necessary – although I will need the ability to incorporate stereo sound within the package. What I mean is: I can separately generate the soundtrack as a stereo aiff file in Garageband or Sound Studio so it is timed exactly to match the presentation, and when everything is finished I can import it into the image software. In fact, this requirement isn't strictly necessary. I am happy to burn the sound to a CD and play that separately, as long as the image software allows me to stop/start/pause wherever I want and shows me the play time. If the CD and the image software get out of sync (because of power loss on the CD player, for example), I can pause the presentation, set the CD to the same time as the image software, and restart from there.
5. Image quality is the most important aspect. Thus, my first step in a particular presentation will be to determine the native resolution of the digital projector. Then all images will be scanned, cropped and resampled to exactly this resolution so that there is no other scaling performed during the presentation.
6. Following on from (5), I want the ability to have variable-size image formats. i.e. for a particular presentation I may want to exactly match the projectors capabilities, say 1024 x 768 so the images will be sampled to that size; but for the next show the projector may have 1680 x 1050 resolution. High Definition format (1920 x 1024?), is a particularly important feature because I will want to burn presentations to Blu Ray eventually, and standardize on that format.
Any suggestions on which software I should be investigating? And I should add – the simpler the better. I will be using it only for the above scenario.

Answer 1

No; you don't want to use iMovie.
iMovie is intended for editing video, and video - standard-definition video, in particular - has a far lower resolution than most stills cameras (digital or film).
So you will be knocking down the sharpness and detail of the originals if you convert them to video.
A high-definition photograph if held on the screen for 10 seconds is just that: one single individual picture - at whatever definition you want - staying on the screen for a particular number of seconds.
Once you bring that into iMovie, you get a stream of pictures (..30 of them a second in the US, 25 per second in Europe..) each on the screen for one thirtieth (or one twenty-fifth) of a second, at a lower resolution than the original.
Standard-def video has a resolution of (roughly) 640x480 pixels = 307,200 pixels ..or about one third of a megapixel ..and the highest-def high definition is about 6x that: 1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels ..two megapixels.
If your original photos were shot with anything higher than a two megapixel camera - which they probably were - then detail will be lost if you convert those pics to even the highest hi-definition video. Furthermore, the video won't (usually) look as sharp as even a 2 megapixel picture, because video is normally presented as interleaved fields of video; each with half the resolution of a complete picture.
This doesn't matter for movies, as the eye can't catch all the detail in a moving picture. But with static photos, the converted-to-video pics will look nowhere near as sharp as the digital - or film - originals.
Because of the characteristics of video, too, as opposed to static pictures, you may find that detail within shadows or highlights is nowhere near as well defined once you've converted your originals to video, instead of keeping them as photographs.
As for adjusting the pics to match the resolution of your projector(s), once again you may be losing definition by doing that. You'd need to experiment to see what happens with various resolutions - and brands - of projectors; some may intelligently resample the images themselves, to give the best possible projection. You may get "twitter" or "moiré" patterns at some resolutions if you have very fine horizontal lines in some pics ..with others, which don't have exactly horizontal fine lines, sampling the pics at twice the resolution of the intended projector(s) may give best results, or just copy them at the highest possible definition, and then let the projection do its best.
I'd use iPhoto first - as that's a program intended for handling still photos - and use it to create a few test Slideshows. iPhoto should give you all that you need, and you can Save Slideshows, and burn them to discs ..as data rather than as movies! (..Blu-Ray discs hold a huge amount of data. Burning Blu-Ray movies, though, will make the pics look poor ..unless you use 'Motion JPEG' format - instead of normal video formats - which keeps a lot of the detail which ordinary video loses: just look at Apple's Tutorials and "Get A Mac" adverts, to see how sharp MJPEG looks!)
iDVD - the Apple program which burns videos to DVDs - can't yet handle Blu-Ray burning, and will automatically downgrade hi-def video to standard-def when you make a project for burning to disc. Roxio's "Toast", can handle HD and Blu-Ray, but the same considerations apply as before: you'll still only get maximum 2 megapixel definition.
Why not try posting your question in the iPhoto Discussions, and see what expertise you can find there..?