Poor-image-quality stills from iMovie

[Randy Clark]

I've suffered a flare-up of crappy-looking still images in my iMovie 
4-produced home video. I first posted about this problem late last year 
(while working in iMovie 3) and never was able to resolve the issue.

In creating a half-hour video, I imported some 30-40 jpegs from a 
folder (NOT directly from iPhoto). Placed the stills and my captured 
video clips into the timeline then went to work on titles, transitions, 
etc.  I mostly used Cross Dissolves in between stills, but threw in a 
few Ripples here & there.  Aside from the problem of the audio level 
dropping down during the titles & transitions (which I posted a message 
about earlier this week), everything seemed normal.

When I sent the video to iDVD, iMovie asked me if I wanted to Render & 
Proceed, or just Proceed.  Since I had no fast/slow motion or reversed 
clips, I assume it was wanting to Render because of all my stills. I 
told it to Render & Proceed and let it send the project to iDVD.  On 
the resulting DVD, the image quality of the stills is pretty bad... 
except during the transitions when they look as sharp as they're 
supposed to.  When this problem occurred last year, my thinking was 
that it had something to do with iMovie's rendering (or not rendering) 
the stills properly (because the pictures looked great DURING the 
transition stages... really pixelated during the NON-transition 
stages).

Am I way off-base with this thinking?  I'm hoping there's some simple 
setting or preference in iMovie that I'm missing which is causing the 
problem. Any iMovie experts able to shed some light on this issue?

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Randy Clark
Kansas City