I'll try to summarize this so you can get the best quality slideshow on your new fancy Mac with products that are included with your system. Causes of poor quality in iMovie could've been due to the fact that it was exporting the file using a DV codec, which looks very bad due to interlacing on computers. I haven't tried going back with iMovie and exporting the so-so quality video with other settings to see how it comes out. Good quality video exported with good settings resulted with a great quality video.
Create a slideshow in iPhoto by creating an album with the pictures you want, then simply press the "Slideshow" button. Check your slideshow settings and set your resolution to 4:3 if you're going to be exporting this to iDVD for burning, otherwise just turn on "Automatic Ken Burns Effect." You'll get a high quality slideshow with nice panning and zooming without having to tweak the motion path and zoom settings for each individual photo. Default settings should also include a dissolve transition between photos. I prefer to have complete control over my photos, so I manually turn on Ken Burns Effect for each photo and use the zoom and start and end settings for each photo. By setting the start and end locations iPhoto will automatically create the motion path and timing to connect the two. You're basically creating keyframes that iPhoto knows how to handle. At this point you could add a soundtrack and make iPhoto stretch or shrink your slideshow to fit your soundtrack. If you want each photo stay display longer than the default 5 seconds you can select all the photos and change the setting to your desired length. Once you're set go to File -> Export and choose the resolution for the slideshow.
Now you can import the file into iMovie if you want to add a soundtrack, titles, or chapter markers for iDVD (or any other DVD burning program). I created a new project with a type of "Mpeg-4" since the properties of my QuickTime file said it was encoded as an mpeg-4. If you're going to export this and only share it via your computer, then you're all set. If you go to Share -> Share you can choose to compress for Full Quality, but it'll come out as a DV file, and result in less quality. Instead, choose Expert Settings. Export it as a QuickTime Movie, and then choose the specific options. Choose Compressor setting H.264. You want to make sure the video encoding is set to best and multipass; it'll take longer, but it's well worth it. For audio settings I choose AAC, best quality, variable bit rate, and 192kbps. It'll probably take half an hr to an hour to encode depending on the slideshow length. Your file will probably be very large (mine ended up being 1 gig). If you want to share the file then you'll probably need to encode it again to shrink it down a bit using an encoder such as ffmpegX. I'll make another post another time about the ffmpegX settings I use, but you'll get 150MB or so for every half an hour.
If you're going to import your slideshow into iDVD then you don't even need to mess around with export settings. iDVD can take iMovie project files as media. iMovie project files will have a small iMovie icon in the lower right hand corner of the poster frame. This'll import the slideshow without any loss of quality due to previous encoding. iDVD will need to encode these files into mpeg-2 to be playable on the DVD anyways. Then just do your stuff as you normally would with iDVD and you're all set!
I'm listing these steps from memory, so if anything that's unclear or mistaken let me know =)
No comments:
Post a Comment