My still photos look blurry on burned iDvds

I've been trying to make a DVD of still photos. My DVD from iDVD is blurry when viewed. It's blurry wether I look at it on a TV or the computer, so it's not a screen quality issue. My photos are nice and clear on iDVD when making the disc, but the disc quality is horrible. Looking at the forums it seems that I'm not the only one with this issue, but all the suggestions either don't make sense to me or I can't make them work. It seems as though some have had success making an iMovie and then making a .mov file in HD, then dragging it into iDVD. I can't drag the .mov file into iDVD. I also cannot burn the .mov file to disc. I'm starting to hate Apple for telling me how intuitive my computer is. If it was so intuitive a computer dummy like me could figure it out. Very frustrated...

Hi
I think that this have several reasons
• No DVD can do the same quality as Your Mac Screen - NON. DVD is as standard SD-video and can not be any better.
• Assemble SlideShows in iMovie'08 or 09 or 11 then Send to iDVD - will make things even worse
a. iMovie'08 or 09 or 11 - can only deliver every second line to iDVD resulting in 50% loss
b. Share to iDVD - makes iMovie to render and so bad - Better is to Share to Media Browser and from iDVD import from it's Media Browser - iDVD renders so much better
So to get best quality DVD is not the way - Blu-Ray or photos on a memory stick can be so much better or even projected directly from the Mac - will give best quality possibly
To get an as good DVD as possibly
• Use a program that can do SlideShows and export them without any loss eg
◊ iMovie up to HD6 (previous versions)
◊ FinalCut any version
◊ FotoMagico™
are what I use.
I let iDVD do the rendering
I use Verbatim DVD-R disks
I set down burn speed to x4 (less burn errors and DVD works on more Players)
Yours Bengt W

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Allan
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Hi
DVD is as standard - only interlaced SD-Video (as on old CRT-TVs) and can never be any better than this.
This is less than a quarter of Your Mac screen resolution.
That's one part of Why You can see High res. on Your Mac - and not on DVD.
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I read your article Bill, and that just seems like a massive amount of work for the average individual who wants to put together a movie. Is all of that really necessary?
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There is a > Discussion > iMovie > iMovie HD6 going on into which I entered. I posted the following earlier today. I am the entrant with trhe Japanese doll in red, can't miss it.
Have you a set prescription that you use when beginning the Burn to Disc from iDVD. That's where my problem is.
Please read the following and send help soon . . . potis
"My rendering is from iPhoto to FotoMagico. There the album is assembled with all of FoMo's attributes. I find it very user friendly. The blurring of a photo in iPhoto with the Blur adjustment does blur alright and it my instances I get a perceptible lightening of the image. Useable, but not the original. —Cut to the finish. Beautiful rendering in FoMo, so sent to iDVD the 130 photos and music. Beautiful in iMac playback in iDVD. Cannot complain a wink. Burn disc. Play disc, and there are the jaggies on the two buildings, one a church with lots of green and white marble on the facade, the other the Ponte Vechicco shimmering as in a desert as the zoom moves out. The jaggies appear on any horizontal or vertical shape, especially buildings (as noted elsewhere in this forum).
My logic says that if the project plays very well in iDVD and wavers in a DVD burnt from iDVD, that the wavies are introduced in the burn process. I tried recording at Slideshow settings of HD 720p as suggested. No help there.
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potis
iMac Mac OS X (10.4.7) "

Still Photo Resolution

The resolution of my still photos looks terrible, even though I imported large jpeg files and scaled them down, not up. I'm doing a project that is only stills and audio, no video and the orginals were quite large. They looked horrible in the program panel, but I figured they would look fine on export, but no. I tried exporting my project about six different ways, maximum render, etc.

There was a post on this site a couple of years ago by Jeff Belune (as I recall) that provided a work flow for this. I fiound it to be effective. Most of the people who post here recommend that you do the scaling in Photoshop and then import the *.PSD file. The pixel dimensions W x H must match the scenario preset pixel dimensions (the DPI and/or image dimensions in inches, have no meaning). If your scenario is 1920 x 1080, then that's what the image size needs to be.
I only remember some of the steps Jeff laid out, but, it was to open the image in Photoshop, set the GENERAL preference to best for reduction, Change the image to 16 bit. Make color, exposure changes as desired, use unsharp mask set to 198, 0.6, 2, set the crop tool to your desired pixel dimensions, and crop the image to the desired size, if desired change the mode back to 8 bit, and save the file under a new name (never mess with your original. I created a photoshop action to speed the process.

Blurry Still Photos in PE 9 (Windows XP –SP3)

When I take sharp still photos, at any resolution and in any format (tif, jpg, psd), they look sharp on a standard def. TV from a burned DVD with a Project Setting of NTSC-DV – Standard (4:3) ONLY. Using NTSC-DV – Wide Screen or NTSC – Hard Disk, Flash Memory Camcorder Standard or Wide-Screen, the stills are slightly, but definitely, blurry. Not a problem if I just want a DVD of stills, but a problem combining video (my camcorder is memory card, std. def., wide-screen) with stills. The video looks nice and sharp. Any suggestions? Thank you

Hi all. I want to thank each of you for taking the time to continue to help me. I really appreciate your efforts.
To minimize duplicate responses, I am pointing each of you to this response. I hope I address all of your comments.
First, I am viewing the photos on a 2 NTSC TV’s. One is a traditional CRT picture tube, the other is a rear projection from individual color CRT’s. I will be checking them out on a state-of-the-art LED-LCD in a few days. Simply, when I set the Project Setting to NTSC-DV Standard Definition 4:3 (meaning full screen 640x480) the stills look quite good.
The problem occurs when I use the Project Settings listed as NTSC-Hard Drive Camcorder, etc. (meaning mpg coming into PE9 like via a card based camcorder (mine is std def)) Wide-Screen 16:9 with input set by PE9 as 720x480. The still photos are recomposed with black bands on each side (either by me manually in PS9 or by PE9 automatically – no difference in image projection). I want to use this setting since I want to combine widescreen video with 3:2 still images in the same project. These are distinctly blurry, but not horrendously so. (I know, not a very scientific/objective description)
And, while I agree with comments made regarding down-rezing, my actual tests showed the best results from a large 3000+ x 2000+ pixel tif file than from any other size and format (I have tried many combinations). In fact, 480 pixel (height) jpg looked to me just slightly better than 480 (height) psd, which made no sense given that psd is supposed to be lossless and jpg is lossy (although I used the least compression available).
Re. interlacing, I did freeze frame and there was a slightly better image displayed, but not as good as the full screen not frozen. I have not yet tried what I would normally consider excessive sharpening to compensate for the still image problem. However, this is still troubling given that full screen looked good.
I am gong to continue to test as time permits, but I wonder if there are 2 compounding problems. First, NTSC TV has 1440 lines of scan, exactly, 3 times 480 pixels, whereas, based on my calculations, 16:9 widescreen letterbox does not yield the number of scan lines an integral multiple of 480. Second, PE9 lists widescreen as 720x480, yet if I take a pixel height of 480, 16:9 should yield a width of 853. While I understand CRT TV’s cut off part of the picture, that oversized width from 720 seems a bit high. (I also know that some number of scan lines are not used in the image, but don’t remember whether these are within the 1440 or in addition to.)
Ted, you mentioned that the stills should be multiples of 640x480 up to 1920x1440. Why not 1920x1080 which gives the 16:9 widescreen format? I have not tried these numbers yet, but will when I get back home.
One last complication is that a project setting of NTSC-Hard Drive, full screen 4:3, was also blurry. I would be willing to believe there is a problem with PE9’s resizing calculations or an issue with using the “right” pixel resolution for widescreen if all full screen settings looked good and only wide screen looked poor.
I know that’s a lot to digest, but better more info than less. And, again, thank you very much for your help.

My still photos look blurry on burned iDvds

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