Photos placed in timeline (from iphoto) have dramatic quality reduction

Question

Basically, I'm looking to make a high quality slide show in iMovie. By high quality I mean I want the pictures to look clear. I scanned most of the photos at 600 dpi or more, so I figured the quality would be fine. And in iPhoto, it DOES look fine.
But when I import a photo into iMovie... it looks horrible. For example, if I take a 9.2 meg jpg from iPhoto and move it to the timeline and choose "get info", iMovie says the clip is only 117 kilobytes. I don't see how that makes any sense....

Answer 1

There are many differences between TVs and computer monitors (..the type with a cathode ray tube..) ..or there were, until flat screen TVs with monitor connections became available.
TVs used to have a lower resolution (far fewer dots, or pixels) than monitors, as TVs were designed to be seen from several feet away, but monitors are for viewing several inches away, and need to show more detail and precision. TVs were based upon 50-year-old standards concerning the number of "lines" of picture which were transmitted, and which were drawn down the screen ..characteristics which were far coarser than the higher resolutions which have been gradually built into every new generation of computer graphics circuitry.
TVs are also intended to show "interlaced" broadcasts; a TV picture is - or always used to be - transmitted as two sets of lines drawn across the screen: the even numbered lines, like 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, etc, followed by the odd ones: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc, slotted in between the others. Because of the "persistence" of the picture on old TV sets (..think of the persistence of a radar picture, with the previous scan gradually fading away as the new scan begins..) the first set of lines would still persist on the screen when the second set were "interleaved" between them, giving the appearance of an entire picture ..and the "persistence of vision" of the human eye, or brain, also appears to keep an entire picture on the TV screen, even when only half of it (..one set of in-between lines..) is really there.
[..Same in a cinema: you think that there's a moving picture constantly up there on the screen; nope ..it's a succession of still pictures, and for almost half the time you're watching there's nothing on the screen at all!..]
Computer circuitry is designed to show an entire picture all at once, instead of having it split into two "interleaved" halves. So many computer displays show just one of those sets of interleaved lines, as the "whole picture" (both sets of lines) generally aren't available simultaneously ..thereby giving half the resolution (detail) of what's in the complete picture, and giving effects like the edge of a comb's teeth if there's rapid movement in the picture: look at the "teeth" around the edges of the train's windows here:
(..Thanks to Adam Wilt's page about "Fields & Frames" here..)
With many flat screen TVs now doubling as monitors - and vice versa - the differences between monitors and TVs are disappearing ..and some types of video, or satellite or cable broadcasts, are now presented as "progressive" (..all details present all at once, with the lines all following one another as a series..) instead of "interleaved" (..one half first, and the other half later).