This Pic cannot be imported correctly

Question

Someone is gonna kick me for this, and I will eventually kick myself I know.
But for the life of me, I cannot import the following photo into iMovie from iPhoto and make it look great.
http://www.tbrstudio.com/newpics/D2X_1395w.jpg
It is jagged, jagged, jagged. It seems like I have tried everything from using higher rez, to adjusting the aspect ratio in Photoshop to meet the information I have read in this discussion group. It appears that most folks are exporting their iMovies to iDVD. I am not. I am going to offer this streamed through my website, or as part of a purchase folks make from me. Almost all of my other photos look fine, but this will not do what I wish it would do.
Any advice I receive would be fantastic and much appreciated.
Cheers,
Joel

Answer 1

Some more questions: (Sorry)
• Are your iMovie Playback preferences set to Highest? If not, change to that setting. Anything lower will look pretty bad.
• Do you recall if you granted iMovie permission to render images when exporting? If you granted permission, that may have caused the jaggies on still images.
If you don't know, import the problem photo with the Ken Burns checkbox both on and off, then export again. When it asks, tell iMovie NOT to render. After the export, check the quality of those two clips in iMovie. If the clips look better than the clips imported earlier, that suggests the jaggies were added because of that bug.
• Other movies imported to iMovie may "turn into a jaggy mess" if they were smaller than iMovie's movie format. If they had to be scaled up in size, that will always affect image quality negatively. They can look pretty terrible, depending on the quality of the imported movie and its size.
• What type of project is it? DV? (The type is shown at the end of the window title at the top of the window. It will say something like "DV-NTSC".)
BTW, QuickTime, the system software iMovie uses, is a very complicated, multi-faceted environment, more complicated than anything else we do on our computers. Although iMovie does a great job protecting us from that complexity, there are tons of ways we can mess up a project.
So when describing a problem, please include whatever details you can. Otherwise the problem has so many possible answers, we're left guessing, with nothing useful to say.
I know it's hard to know what information to include, for you're new to the Mac and probably to QuickTime. But tell us what you can, for even the vaguest information helps. If you need help finding out answers to questions, just ask.
I would be remiss if I didn't suggest a couple ways to learn more than can ever be covered here.
• Apple's iMovie tutorial is very useful, although I suspect you're past much of what it offers:
http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/imovie/
• David Pogue's book "iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual" will help you quickly get your head around these two programs. It's great for both getting a quick start and considerable depth of knowledge. And it's a fun read.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/imovie06tmm/
Pogue's book about Mac OS X is an excellent introduction to the Mac.
Karl