[MacDV] Best way to make simple slideshows for DVD?

[Brett Conlon]

Hi all,

I'm working on a small home DVD project and am trying to build a simple 
slideshow fading from slide to slide and while DVD Studio Pro offers this 
feature in a fast and simple way I'm just so unimpressed with the final 
results.

I have found that it works best if you set all your stills at 678X576 
(PAL) so DVD Studio Pro doesn't have to resize them but when you play the 
slideshow from your DVD on your DVD player there is a few frames of very 
low resolution image which shows just before each of the dissolve 
transitions kick in - very distracting (in group shots, eyes and teeth 
momentarily disappear in the blocks of pixels that appear)! If your images 
are any other size (like original size from the camera) and DVD Studio Pro 
has to resize them for you, I have found that every still frame looks 
terribly low rez but the transitions look fine.

Because of this I've used Final Cut Pro on a previous project or two to 
manually make slideshows but this involves calculating the exact duration 
of each slide before importing the pics, manually setting the transition 
between each slide. And if you change the duration of the music you have 
to manually change the duration of each slide and kinda build it again... 
but perhaps there is a better way that I don't know of.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I love the ease of setting up the 
DVDSPro slideshows (eg. set the slide durations as per the music length) 
but they just don't work properly for me!

I don't have iMovie installed but that shouldn't be a problem if someone 
recommended that route.

All suggestions welcome!

Cheers,

Cojcolds

ps. for some reason when I set the stills duration preference in Final Cut 
Pro (v5.0.4) to a desired value (eg. 00:00:05:00) the actual duration of 
the imported stills is different (eg. 00:00:04:04) so I have to keep 
guessing the preference and import the pics, delete them and try a 
different value until the correct duration appears. To have them import as 
5 seconds I have to set the preference to 6 seconds. To have them 7 
seconds I have to set the prefs to 8:11 seconds...