Ken Burns vs Photo to Movie test

Question

I did a quick simple test to see how iMovie's Ken Burns and Photo to Movie manage high resolution, high frequency still images as their input:
I made a 3150x1728 (5 megapixel) TIF image. I chose that particular ratio because it completely fills both NTSC and PAL 16:9 frame when imported to iMovie HD 5-6's widescreen project.
I inserted 1 pixel thin horizontal and vertical black stripes at every 100 pixel. That kind of thin (high frequency) lines tend to flicker on a TV unless they are blurred.
Then I imported the still to a widescreen NTSC (I chose NTSC for Karl, Fred, Kirk and other NTSC-geared geeks iMovie HD 6.0.3 project and applied a 2 second 1-5x zoom to it.
I did a similar zoom with Photo to Movie 3.2.2's High Quality export setting and compared the results...
Well, the iMovie zoom-in was quite interesting: at modest zoom factors many stripes were omitted and the stripes disappeared and appeared as the zoom progressed! Some stripes were rendered grayish, but they were always 1 pixel thin (a recipe for flicker on a TV!). Only near the end of the zoom-in, all the stripes appeared and begun to grow thicker (and non-flickery on a TV).
The Photo to Movie zoom-in was much "duller": all stripes were preserved and they were slightly blurred (which prevents flicker on a TV).
The winner: Photo to Movie.
The input TIF and 2 second output .dv files are below (to my surprise the 15 MB input zipped to only 1.8 MB with this material). I turned ON the high quality display for you in the .dv files, but verify that the setting sticks when viewing them with QuickTime Player Pro. You can advance one frame at a time via the left/right arrow keys.
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~shmhav/kenburnstest.zip

Answer 1

Discussing DVD playback on a TV, Matti said:
The output that used the original TIF as its input
was full of artifacts and lots of flicker with the
moderate zoom factors. Gaussian blur was also quite
bad while the 875x480 downsampled TIF was very
peaceful. Of course the 875x480 was somewhat fuzzy
with the extreme zoom factors.
Photo To Movie's Higher Quality setting was very
peaceful with practically no flicker on the TV.
I admit that this is an artificial and a very
difficult test image. But I have seen the same
artifacts with real JPGs as well if there are hard
lines in the image (buildings, wires, waves, fine
patterns etc).
I've seen similar results here too, burning perhaps a hundred DVDs in the last few weeks. The goal was to compare DVD slideshows created by iMovie, Photo to Movie and FotoMagico. Matti's conclusions look familiar.
My tests used photos that are the most difficult for iMovie to handle, lots of hard lines, buildings, wires, fences, roof lines, etc.
When the goal is to burn a DVD, Photo to Movie consistently delivers good quality with a variety of source images. The quality is good across a range of image sizes and content. If you like working in Photo to Movie, you can be quite confident you'll get good results.
But I like working in iMovie, so the goal of my tests was to find a way to make iMovie work better. The solution was to downsize the image before importing it to iMovie.
As Matti suggested, iMovie delivers good results if the source image is downsized before importing to iMovie. Virtually all flicker is eliminated by downsizing to 640x480 (NTSC) or 768x578 (PAL). (Downsize less if you plan to use a 2x or greater Ken Burns zoom.)
Downsizing is easily done with iPhoto's File > Export command. It takes just a few seconds to export new copies of photos at the new size.
So is Photo to Movie "better" than iMovie for slideshows? Sometimes Yes, if you don't want to resize problem images. But often not, at least from my tests. iMovie can deliver fine results too. And to be fair to iMovie, it has other advantages.
Note: Our tests may have little in common with the pictures you often shoot, the people pictures, the landscapes, the other "soft" images. They are WAY easier for iMovie to handle, and may not require downsizing. It depends on the photo's content.
Karl