Low Quality JPEG Images

[William Hofius]

Randy,

You have nothing to worry about. I was in the same boat as you earlier 
this summer, having spent several hours making high-res designs in 
Photoshop. When sent to Final Cut Express and then exported to iDVD, 
they looked gawd awful. I drove myself nuts trying to figure out a 
solution. Turns out I had nothing to worry about.

In a very watered down explanation, iMovie and iDVD take your high 
resolution computer images and converts them into the appropriate 
quality for a television. A television has a much lower resolution than 
your Apple Cinema Display. (Only 512 horizontal lines of resolution for 
a standard television). When you view your rendered project in iMovie 
or iDVD, you are viewing that lower "television quality" image through 
the "high quality" computer display. This highlights the difference in 
resolutions. In the end, everything will be fine.


On Saturday, December 13,  03, at 07:32  AM, Randy wrote:

> Sorry if the subject is misleading Wasn't sure how to title this post:
>
> A friend and I are both creating videos in iMovie. His is a slide
> show of numerous JPEGs from a Canon Digital Rebel, with cross 
> dissolves between each image.  After he
> completed it in iMovie, he went to "Create iDVD project" and sent it 
> to iDVD 3.01.  When we viewed
> the DVD on an Apple Cinema Display, we noticed that the stills looked 
> horrible.  Basically, they look like low-resolution preview images. 
> However, when you watch closely, the images look nice & sharp DURING 
> the
> transition phases of the image (both at the beginning & end of the 
> photo).
>
> During the time the stills alone appear, they look jagged & very 
> low-quality.
>
> We're thinking that it's because the stills themselves have not been 
> rendered by iMovie (whereas
> the transitions, obviously, are rendered portions of the video).  We 
> know that if you have the Ken
> Burns effect checked before importing JPEGs, the stills begin 
> rendering once they pop into the shelf.  However, all our JPEGs were 
> imported without the Burns effect selected.
>
> Our big question is:  now that the iMovies have been completed (ie all 
> the titles & cross-dissolves in place), how do we go about rendering 
> all the digital stills in order to get them to appear high-quality in 
> the final iDVD-created disc? Do we have to remove all the transitions, 
> apply the Burns effect to each still image in  order to make iMovie 
> render them, then re-apply all the transitions?
>
> Sounds like a huge pain in the butt to me.
> Thanks,
> Randy