Presentation - iPhoto or iMovie

[VanMac]

I need to create a slideshow for the in-laws 50th anniversary.

Basically it will be a few hundred pictures set to music. It will just kinda be projected to screen in the background while they have an open house going on.

Is iPhoto best suited to this, or am I better off creating an iMovie to allow more flexibilty of sounds, music, transitions.

Any input appreciated.

 

[liketom]

i would use imovie cos that my bag


but with iphoto you'll get better quality pics

or why not go the full distance and buy keynote and be your own steve jobs

 

[liketom]

saying that i just created a imove for my new zealand trip and put some music to it and it does look great - will upload it for you to have a look at if you want

 

[kgarner]

It depends on what you want. If you want to just grab a bunch of photos and add music and the same transition between each photo at given intervals, then iPhoto is best (and easiest). If you want to control each photo's movement (Ken Burns Effect) and use different transitions and intervals, then iMovie would be a better (but more time consuming) tool.

 

[VanMac]

saying that i just created a imove for my new zealand trip and put some music to it and it does look great - will upload it for you to have a look at if you want

Hey. For sure...upload it....would love to have a look!

 

[VanMac]

It depends on what you want. If you want to just grab a bunch of photos and add music and the same transition between each photo at given intervals, then iPhoto is best (and easiest). If you want to control each photo's movement (Ken Burns Effect) and use different transitions and intervals, then iMovie would be a better (but more time consuming) tool.

Thanks for the input. Kinda what I figured.

 

[pommydan]

imovie photo quality problems

Hey there

someone must be clever enough out there to help me out.

Started archiving all my old photos and creating dvds. started off using iphoto which is great for compiling a quick slideshow to a couple of music tracks. i then imported these to idvd and created my first dvd project which i was pretty pleased with for a first attempt. The only thing i found annoying was that i could not link all the slideshows together in idvd so that they played one after another, instead you had to come back to the menu and start the next one...so i thought i would import these slideshow movies into imovie and create a complete movie with chapters, titles etc...

but...when i did this i noticed that the quality of the slideshow in imovie was very noticeably worse...bummer

being new to mac i wasnt sure what was up so i thought about importing the photos directly into imovie and working with them there. but...once again the quality was really poor compared to the iphoto and idvd slideshows. after this i though maybe its just a preview problem and all will be well when i burn them to dvd and watch them on tv...so i burnt a dvd with one slideshow created in iphoto and imported into idvd and also put on a movie of the same slide show that id imported into imovie and back..

anyway long story short quality still better in slide show created in iphoto...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

please help otherwise i will go mad!!!! either to get better quality still photos in imovie. or to be able to link slideshows in idvd to play one after the other (this would be the easiest solution to my problem)

I wait in anticipation

Pommydan

 

[Dave00]

...so i thought i would import these slideshow movies into imovie and create a complete movie with chapters, titles etc...

but...when i did this i noticed that the quality of the slideshow in imovie was very noticeably worse...bummer

I'm not sure why this is, but creating a slideshow in iPhoto and importing it to iMovie does result in sucky quality. (Probably has something to do with re-encoding photos). Your best bet is to start again with the photos. Also, the "Ken Burns" effect is enormously useful. Even a little bit of movement really makes the pictures come to life and hides the low resolution of the TV image. It does take significantly more time to do this, but the end-result is much better. I'm not sure why re-starting with the photos resulted in lower quality than an iPhoto slideshow - you may want to look at some of the preferences settings.

But really try the Ken Burns thing - even move just slightly in each picture - it makes a big difference.

Good luck.

Dave

 

[Mr. Anderson]

the thing with iMovie is that you can't do much editing once you've made the movie. In iPhoto, just change the images around/add/remove. The only thing you might need to do for iPhoto is create a few title images...

D

 

[Dave00]

the thing with iMovie is that you can't do much editing once you've made the movie.

Huh? I'm not sure what you mean here. You can certainly edit your iMovie projects. Sure, you can't edit the movie you export to iDVD, but you can change the iMovie project and then re-export it.

Dave

 

[ziwi]

I do the slideshows each year and while doing it on a PC was such a hassel, the Mac made the process much simpler. My issue revolves around why when I see a slideshow in iPhoto it looks great that any method of doing a slideshow to get it on DVD - iphoto export, make an iMovie or iDVD slideshow results in poor quality. The photo's appear to be spasming or really low res when in fact I use 4MP and 8MP pictures. Is there a way to replicate the iPhoto on the mac quality to a DVD for viewing? It seems a waste to make good pictures look like they were taken with a homemade pin hole camera?

Any thoughts on this - I have tried various methods - will another program like toast provide better quality?

Thanks.

 

[road dog]

Any thoughts on this - I have tried various methods - will another program like toast provide better quality?

Toast comes with an app called Motion Pictures which blows away the iPhoto and iMovie slideshows.

 

[rjphoto]

I do the slideshows each year and while doing it on a PC was such a hassel, the Mac made the process much simpler. My issue revolves around why when I see a slideshow in iPhoto it looks great that any method of doing a slideshow to get it on DVD - iphoto export, make an iMovie or iDVD slideshow results in poor quality. The photo's appear to be spasming or really low res when in fact I use 4MP and 8MP pictures. Is there a way to replicate the iPhoto on the mac quality to a DVD for viewing? It seems a waste to make good pictures look like they were taken with a homemade pin hole camera?

Any thoughts on this - I have tried various methods - will another program like toast provide better quality?

Thanks.

I'm confussed by all of this talk of low quality. I use iPhoto > iMovie > iDVD all of the time. (Granted, I've never gone straight from iPhoto to iDVD. Now I'm going to have to go try it just to see.)

I do 3 or 4 shows a month, mostly old (paper) photos for wedding rehearsal presentations of the bride and groom growing up. (I know, it's sappy, but it helps pay the bills.)

All of my stills are shot at least 3MP (up to 12MP depending on the quality of the original and how much editing needs to be done). I then edit, color correct and crop in PhotoShop CS2 (AHG on a PC) then take them to the eMac for compilation. All of the "old photos" and new Digital images are brought into iPhoto and exported as .jpg at TV resolution (640x480). That's all iMovie needs unless you are doing some major Ken Burns effects. (RANT: to me the Ken Burns effect is cool but tiresome. It takes a lot of work to change effects around so that it's not the same thing on every photo. Not to mention that the main subject of all of the photos will not be in the same place every time. Try readjusting 200+ photos so that the effect zooms to the right place every time. Even after turning it off on several photos the pictures had to all be re-centered.) (Sorry.)

Make sure you change the file names to something numeric using zeros infront of all numbers until you get to 100 ( 001,002..030, 031). When you import them into iMovie they will be in order.

Now build you movie and place your transitions and music and export to iDVD.

Picture duration can be changed in the Ken Burns area all at once or one at a time. This will help match your music length.

Another thing to consider is adding video to the "Slide show". Can't do that in iPhoto can you?

Hope that helps. Good luck.

(Gee, I didn't mean to be so long...again, sorry.)

 

[ziwi]

I have done this - take the album and drop the photo's in Imovie and I get the spasm effect - jaggies, whatever you want to call it. Then make a DVD from it since you can't trust the playback in iMovie - and bam the quality is much worse than the iPhoto slideshow. I even made a DVD of iPhoto slideshow to DVD, imove slideshow to DVD and then the direct slideshow to DVD - they all do not measure up to what the picture looks like on the computer screen from iPhoto.
I have high res pics, so are you suggesting that I lower the resolution of the pictures to make them look better for the DVD? That seems like alot of work - to me though that may be the issue the pictures are too big. The other issue is that iMovie turns a nice still into a movie file where iPhoto does not until you burn it. Is it so bad to want to have the picture quality match what was in iPhoto?

Are you saying that your pictures look the same in iPhoto as they do in the completed iMovie? I even set the KB effect off and left the begin and end at 1 so there was no motion and it still had the ripple effect in water and in bricks, etc.

 

[rjphoto]

I have done this - take the album and drop the photo's in Imovie and I get the spasm effect - jaggies, whatever you want to call it. Then make a DVD from it since you can't trust the playback in iMovie - and bam the quality is much worse than the iPhoto slideshow. I even made a DVD of iPhoto slideshow to DVD, imove slideshow to DVD and then the direct slideshow to DVD - they all do not measure up to what the picture looks like on the computer screen from iPhoto.
I have high res pics, so are you suggesting that I lower the resolution of the pictures to make them look better for the DVD? That seems like alot of work - to me though that may be the issue the pictures are too big. The other issue is that iMovie turns a nice still into a movie file where iPhoto does not until you burn it. Is it so bad to want to have the picture quality match what was in iPhoto?

Are you saying that your pictures look the same in iPhoto as they do in the completed iMovie? I even set the KB effect off and left the begin and end at 1 so there was no motion and it still had the ripple effect in water and in bricks, etc.

I spent 20 minutes going through the steps on one computer and typing them into another one on the forum. The phone rang and it was an urgent request and I accidently hit the RED-X and closed the window... ARRRGGG.

Now, back to our topic. during that 20 minutes I exported some photos from iPhoto at 640x4?? and imported them into iMovie. Then I used iMovie's link to iPhoto to do the same photos at a higher resolution (3400 x something).

I exported them as Quicktime DV to the Desktop and watched them in the Present Movie mode at the Normal size. They looked about the same, not great compared to the images in iPhoto or even Preview. I did notice they looked stretched.

So, then I imported them into iDVD and went back to iPhoto and sent them to iDVD directly...The images were smaller, but man what a difference. They seem to be much sharper so far in the iDVD Preview mode.

But after burning a DVD and watching it on another screen, I really can't tell a difference other than the images are smaller and I have to click the forward button to change images. Each photo is a new chapter. Maybe there is a setting in iPhoto for that...

I'm going to go play it on a TV...I'll be back.

 

[rjphoto]

Stupid Sanyo DVD/VCR. The DVD tray wouldn't eject.... I'm going to have to take it home.

More tomorrow.

 

[Applespider]

Are you saying that your pictures look the same in iPhoto as they do in the completed iMovie? I even set the KB effect off and left the begin and end at 1 so there was no motion and it still had the ripple effect in water and in bricks, etc.

That's one of the things that the Missing Manual suggests for getting better quality...

The other is not pushing the Create DVD button in iMovie but rather dragging the icon in the iMovie title bar over to the iDVD icon in the Dock. Apparently, it means that the picture then skips the rendering in iMovie and it happens in iDVD which is better?

 

[themacmaestro]

I need to create a slideshow for the in-laws 50th anniversary.

Basically it will be a few hundred pictures set to music. It will just kinda be projected to screen in the background while they have an open house going on.

Is iPhoto best suited to this, or am I better off creating an iMovie to allow more flexibilty of sounds, music, transitions.

Any input appreciated.

You would have even better success with Final Cut Express since you can do more editing with the music, and intwine video as well.

 

[xsedrinam]

I need to create a slideshow for the in-laws 50th anniversary.

Basically it will be a few hundred pictures set to music. It will just kinda be projected to screen in the background while they have an open house going on.

Is iPhoto best suited to this, or am I better off creating an iMovie to allow more flexibilty of sounds, music, transitions.

Any input appreciated.

I don't see this mentioned, but if you have Keynote, there are some nice Themes for this kind of thing, and the quality of fonts and look would be a good option. Since it's going to be "background" and not a stand alone piece, I don't see the need to look at iMovie, FCP or any higher level editing. meh