Photoshop still photos look extremely grainy in iMovie '08

I'm making a photo slideshow DVD for a wedding using iMovie '08. The photographer asked me to include his photos he made with Photoshop. Some of the photos have effects on them. Other photos still look grainy even though they don't seem to have any effects on them. I promise I'm not being picky. You can barely see their faces on some of the photos. All of them look outright crappy. In iPhoto they look great. They range from 3 MB to 7 MB and have a size of 3522 × 2348.
I exported the project as a large movie to see if they looked better once they were exported (instead of just in the viewer), but they look the same.
Any ideas?

To expand on QTKirk's thoughts... Your large images are scaled to a maximum HD project height of 1080 with corresponding width to maintain your original aspect ratio. These scaled images are then stored in the project as individual frames in a movie file named "Still Images" which you can check if you open the project package. So it does not matter whether you pre-scale your photos externally. In addition, anything burned to DVD, as QTKirk said, is again re-scaled to 640x480 standard or 853x480 widescreen (NTSC square pixels) and encoded as a 720x480 data matrix with the appropriate aspect flag set for burning.
In any case, was thrown by your "I'm not being picky" comment and may have been looking too deeply for an alternative cause of the problem in your case. Have to admit that Kirk's answer does seem to be the most logical but does rely on individual perceptions of quality which I was trying to "get around."

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Shot photos in camera raw and after editing and saving as jpeg photo becomes extremely grainy

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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

How do I create still photos from a video in iMovie?

I am looking to create a still photo from my video. Is this possible? Thanks for any help you can give..

If you want to create a still frame from within iMovie, move your playhead to the frame you want a still image from and ctrl-click. You'll get a slightly different option to create a still frame depending on whether you do this in the project or event window.
From the event window iMovie will add a still at the end of your project, from the project window it will add a still at the playhead.
If you wanted the still on your desktop rather than in iMovie, select the still, ctrl click and choose reveal in finder, copy the image to your desktop and undo your actions in iMovie to remove the still from the project.

Exporting still photos with Ken Burns from iMovie to Keynote

I am new to the Mac and have no experience of iMovie. I am putting together a slide lecture that uses photos and graphics to promote a coffee-table book on conservation issues. The presentation will use manual advance and will be shown to public audiences on large screens. The quality of the projected image is very important so I will be using a high quality Canon projector with a resolution of 1400x1050.
Some images are of landscapes and I want to use the Ken Burns effect that is available in iPhoto and iMovie but, for some unknown reason, not in Keynote. I posted this first with the Keynote Discussion Forum and was advised to move the photos from iPhoto to iMovie, apply the Ken Burns effect in iMovie, and then export to Keynote via Quicktime. My question is, if I do this, will my Ken Burns landscapes retain the same size and quality of projected image as the rest of my Keynote presentation? My impression is that using this process I may lose quality, but I hope I'm wrong. Please advise.

Some background: Importing photos with the Ken Burns checkbox ON causes iMovie to render a video clip from the photo. That's an entirely different process than importing the photo as a "still" image. Unfortunately, Ken Burns and several other rendering routines are vulnerable to factors that sometimes cause them to fail. The disk format can cause failure, third-party software, inadequate video cards and the like. The factors often have nothing to do with iMovie itself.
The same problems can occur when rendering other kinds of clips too, such as themes and special effects. (Ken Burn gets the bad rep because it's where the problems usually occur for users.)
Some of the items you listed in your Library/QuickTime folder are third-party products. There may be others too in the other folders mentioned in the link I posted earlier, so be sure to look in those too. And in iMovie plug-in folders.
Sometimes necessary items are missing that should exist. One I've seen mentioned here occasionally is the QuartzComposer.component, which should reside in your System/Library/QuickTime folder. If it's not there that might cause the problems you see.
Installing/reinstalling the QuickTime 7.1.6 might help. I've seen reports of problems going away after that update. Repeating the update won't hurt.
Have you tried creating a new user account and running iMovie as that user? If iMovie runs okay as that user that suggests a software conflict when you are the user. Unfortunately, if the software is installed in places where it applies to all users it will cause problems for the new user too.
I'd keep trying to find some software component causing trouble for QuickTime/iMovie. It's clear some third-party components have been installed; there might be others. Perhaps stuff related to AVI?
Karl

Still photos in iMovie hd

I want to import some still photos from my desktop into iMovie HD (v 6.0.2). How should I prepare them so they will look their best? How big (pixel dimensions)? What dpi?

Hi Slphoto:
This, from Dan Slagle, may help you..
What size should I scan my images?
http://www.danslagle.com/mac/iMovie/video/2003.shtml
I prefer .tiff, but I don't really think there is a giant difference between the two.
Sue

Poor still photo quality in iMovie 10

Does anyone know how to improve the quality of still photos imported from iphoto to imovie 10. They are fine in iphoto but
become blurry in imovie 10

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.
Another suggestion has been that the digital cameras are ahead of the iMac Dual Core capabilities. I don't know about that. My Pentax SLR does load them in.
For the moment I am eliminating the two dramatic zooms because they are distracting and waiting for a solution which will have to take form outside of my meager experience.
Thanks muchas for your reply.
potis
iMac Mac OS X (10.4.7) "

Pogue says still pics look awful in dvd--true?

David Pogue (in iMovie & iDVD 5) says "Mac fans try to turn their digital photos into DVD slideshows using iMovie--and find out that the photos look terrible" once the iMovie is burned to dvd. He blames this on "iMovie's low-quality photo-rendering..." (p. 489) He suggests applying the Ken Burns effect to all photos, thereby turning them into video clips rather than stills. Ok, fine, but I want stills in my iMovie. I know that you can utilize the Burns effect without actually "moving" the picture. Will this, though, bypass the poor quality of the pictures on dvd?

Will this, though, bypass the poor quality of the pictures on dvd?
Yes.
Karl

Sequence finished - PAL iDVD - Still Photos Pixelated

I have finished a sequence which contains video and stills taken be digital cameras.
I use iPhotos to sort the photos.
When I look at the output either in FCE canvas or after I burned an iDVD (and watched it thru my PowerBook) the still photos look very pixelated; much worse than the video. So what I am saying is this is not an iDVD issue altho the iDVD slideshow of the same images looked great.
I don't think the choice of PAL on the iDVD was material as the image was pixelated in the FCE canvas. But, in past projects I have ignored pixelation when viewing in FCE Canvas as the image seems to improve once one views the DVD.
I used three methods to import these photos into FCE, drag and drop directly from iPhoto into the FCE Browser pane, create a still image through Still Life and create a still image through iMovie. In both the Still Life and iMovie I did not creat any movement and 'shared' both as dv.
I would be grateful for another solution. Surely people use still images successfully in FCE.
As I am in the US I do not have access to a PAL DVD. I am making this movie up for friends in Australia.

Taking NTSC material to PAL (or vice versa) within Final Cut always looks pretty bad to me in my opinion. You really need a good software standards converter like Graeme Nattress' standards converter to do this correctly.
As far a the still images go, you still haven't said if you're looking at the output on a video monitor. The material is being rendered into an interlaced video format for that type of monitor.
How large are the images? A high resolution image that has to be scaled significantly to fit video resolution and have the pixel aspect altered may have too much detail to be modified and then compressed well in a highly compressed format like DV. You're taking your 1.2MB frame and compressing it down to the equivalent of a 120KB frame. If you start with a frame that fits the right resolution and is the correct pixel aspect Final Cut will have to do less to the image, and you're more likely to get a better result.

Still photo wavy in finished dvd

still photos looks wavy, ripple in the finished DVD using Ilife 09. The photo looks good in iDVD. I had used iDVD 08, it had never happen before. Please help!

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.
Another suggestion has been that the digital cameras are ahead of the iMac Dual Core capabilities. I don't know about that. My Pentax SLR does load them in.
For the moment I am eliminating the two dramatic zooms because they are distracting and waiting for a solution which will have to take form outside of my meager experience.
Thanks muchas for your reply.
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.

I have used still photos to make a Quick Time movie using FCE. The DVD made using i-DVD looks somewhat grainy and the motion isn't smooth when played on my TV. Other DVD's I have made play much better and I am wondering if the problem is my Quick Time m

I have used still photos to make a Quick Time movie using FCE. The DVD made using i-DVD looks somewhat grainy and the motion isn’t smooth when played on my TV. Other DVD’s I have made play much better and I am wondering if the problem is my Quick Time movie settings. The Dimensions and size of the problem movie are 1920X1080 and 584 MB respectively, while the movies that play better have Dimensions of 853X480 and are about 1.3 GB in size. Is this the source of my problem and how do I change things for the better.

Are you exporting to QuickTime Movie, or to QuickTime Conversion? For iDVD, you need to export to QuickTime Movie. Exporting to QT Conversion will kill the quality if you are moving the video from FCE to iDVD.
The file size per se makes no difference.
What size (pixel dimensions) are the photos that you put into your 1920x1080 sequence? Also, exactly what are the sequence properties ... is it 1920x1080i60 ... or i50? In North America it should be i60.
853X480 is an odd frame size. Where are you seeing this number? It would appear to be DV-NTSC, which has a frame size of 720x480. Your 1920x1080 frame size would not be DV-NTSC, it would be Apple Intermediate Codec. DV and AIC will look different, for sure.
Also, your quality setting in iDVD can affect the final video. You may want to check that also (in iDVD Preferences > Projects). Set it to Professional Quality if at all possible.

Problems setting duration for still photos and transitions in iMovie '11

I downloaded iMovie 11 from the Apps Store last night and am trying to make my first movie with it today. I use still photos exclusively.
For most - but not all - I like 5 seconds for photos and for transitions 2 seconds. I do vary this on occasion and so do not check "for all photos' or "for all transitions".
I can't get these settings to work with this version of iMovie. For example, I added a photo (5 sec) then a transition (2 sec) which changed the duration time of the photo - as it should. But when I double clicked the photo, to bring up the inspector window to change the duration of the photo, nothing happened. Then I added another photo. The duration of the first photo increased to 7 seconds and nothing I do seemed to change that.
The time increases seem random: for example, sometimes the time on the still photo increases to 6:29 sec, sometimes to 7 sec.
The duration for the transitions always remains the same - 2 sec; it's the time for the photos that jumps around. And I haven't been able to find a way to get back to 5 sec.
Before posting this, I researched and found an number of earlier posts detailing the same issues.
However, none of these posts had stars to indicate the problem was solved.
Has anyone found a solution or is this a bug that should be reported to Apple?

Interesting!!
I've spent a lot of hours on this too, but I have come up with a different solution perhaps because I like to vary both the image duration and the transition duration in my movies.
Here's my process:
-> Knowing that (a) I want most of the photos to be visible for 5 seconds and most transitions for 2 seconds and (b) that a transition takes half from the photo before and half from the photo after, under File>Project Properties>Photo Duration I chose 7 seconds - each photo will 'lose' a total of 2 seconds from the transitions in front and behind. I did not check either "Applies to all transitions." or "Applies to all photos." - See below for why.
-> I discovered, as you have, that all the photos have to go in before I add any transitions. This was new to me. With all previous versions of iMovie I simply added a photo then a transition then another photo one at a time. I had to fiddle with the timing adjustments, but at least I could fiddle. With this new version of iMovie I can't. Once the transition is in place, I cannot change the duration of the photo.
-> Sometimes, I want a longer or shorter duration for a photo. For example, on photos to which I apply the Ken Burns effect, I often want the image on the screen for a slightly longer time. In this case, I have to use the inspector to change the duration before I add the transitions. So I might set the time for 8 seconds; when both transitions are added, the time for this photo becomes 6 seconds, which is what I want.
-> The same applies if I want a transition to be shorter or longer than 2 seconds. If, for example, I want the duration for a transition to be 1 second, then I have to change the duration on the two linked photos to 5 1/2 seconds.
All of this requires much more prior planning than I am used to with iMovie. Right now, I working with batches of 5 or 6 photos at a time. I don't put a transition on the last photo in the batch until I have added the next group of photos. And things get really tricky if I don't like my original design. If I want to change anything, I have to take out all of the transitions linking the photos I want to work on, do the math, make the changes in the photo durations, then put the transitions back.
Perhaps I am trying to make iMovie do more than it was intended to do, I don't know. Perhaps this problem stems from the fact that I bought just iMovie 11 from the Mac Apps Store and not the entire iLife 11. Don't know that either. But at least I have found a way to make the movie look the way I want it to look.
Thanks for sharing your process. I will use it when the circumstances are right.

Photos look grainy

When I add still shots they look really grainy on my PC. Is this normal?
A photo in particular is 1.68MB so it's not like it is small.

I thought Larger was better.
With respect to print work, it is. Using the "way-back machine," I used to shoot everything from full-page up on 8 x 10. Then, I dropped back to 4 x 5. When digitizing my film became an option, I'd always opt for 1000ppi scans as a minimum and just work from monster files. Nowadays, most of my still work is done on a 12 megapixel camera.
Now with Video, we are constrained by the output size. [Similar happened when images were earlier used for Web work. Download times, and the display setups of users of the Internet dictated much smaller images.] If one is outputting to DVD, then either the NTSC, or PAL, sizes become the target. Shooting at the camera's highest possible resolution is still good advice, but one must find the ultimate method to get the images down to usable size.
There are basically two ways to do this (one does have some variations). One can let the NLE do the work. Most are pretty good at this, but there are two problems: NLE's are designed to work with Video and not really to process still images - the quality suffers when resizing; like the bandwidth limitations of large images on the Web, computer resources are directed to processing these large images. Because of the former, I recommend using an image processing program, like PS to do the resizing. They are designed to do just this - handle still images in the best way possible. Also, one is now only processing that one image, not a Video of it, made up of many smaller images. Basically, you're processing one frame and not 30/second of Video. The algorithms used by an image processing program are better, more accurate and more efficient, than those used in an NLE.
If I can achieve better quality and also lower the resource load on my computer, I view this as a win-win situation. As PS (and PSE) has Actions to "script" operations, I can batch process all of my still images in a few brief moments for use in Video. It takes me far longer just editing out the images that I will not use, than it does to process 1000 for use in a Video.
Travel safely, and let me know how the quality looks, when you do the resizing outside of your NLE. Remember too, the Program Monitor in about all NLE's is just an emulation, a preview, if you will, of what that image will look like on a TV. For critical judgement, I strongly suggest doing a DVD RW (if one is going to DVD), and playing on a set-top player, hooked to a TV. If one only views on the Program Monitor of the NLE and on their computer screen, then I strongly recommend that the settings in the Program Monitor be set to High/Highest Quality, not Automatic, and the Magnification be set to 100% and not to Fit. Also, if the NLE indicates that the footage needs to be Rendered (red line above the footage in most NLE's), Render it first. Otherwise, with an un-Rendered Clip, the Program Monitor set to Automatic and Fit, it's a bit like trying to judge the quality of a photograph by looking only at the thumbnail of that photograph. You can only get a rough idea of the content of that photograph and can really make no judgement on its quality.
Good luck,
Hunt

Photos look good in CS6 but grainy in other programs

I am using CS6 and doing various editing on photos. They are raw files initially and once I am finished with the editing and flattening I save them as .png files. The photos look great when I view them in photoshop yet when I look at them in Bridge or other programs (Windows), they look grainy and the colors appear muted. Any ideas on what may be the cause?

the colors appear muted.
Did you embed the profile?
Why png anyway?
As for the grainyness:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5219275#5219275

Photoshop still photos look extremely grainy in iMovie '08

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