Slideshows burned to DVD have poor resolution

Question

I just started using iMovie for doing slideshows and the resolution is really bad when burning to DVD. What am I doing wrong? My photos are fairly big but even when I strink them they come out bad. Same happens with iDVD.
[ Edited by Host ]

Answer 1

There are MANY factors that can influence the quality of a slideshow that is put on a DVD.
The usual issue is people not understanding that a DVD image is lesss than 640x480 Pixels in NTSC - that's less than 0.3 megapixels. Blowing such a small image up to full screen on a computer monitor will never match the original quality of a 'multi'-megapixel digital camera image.
Having said that, there ARE ways of optimizing the quality of slideshows you create on DVDs. I recently created several large slideshows using FotoMagico - by using the custom output option, I was able to create DV movies that in my opinion were sharper that those I could produce in iMovie and which produced better DVDs. Other people prefer to use Photo to Movie. I believe both operate in a trial mode so you can see it you like the results.
Another way to optimize quality is to use something like Photoshop to resize your images to the sizes recommended in Preparing images for DVD slideshows at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/6.0/en/17.html because Photoshop seems to do a better job of reducing the image sizes than does Quicktime as used by iMovie/iDVD.
BTW, in iDVD , despite the names Apple has give the two compression modes, 'Best Performance' will usually give you a better looking slideshow DVD than will 'Best Quality'. ONLY use 'Best Quality' if your content runs over 60 minutes on a single-layer disc.
F Shippey