From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

I recently burned a CD of photos for a relative, only to find that she
has a clutzy PC that has limited ram, and can only put up 256 colors.
The photos are high res (3-6 MB compressed) and there is no way she can
view them on her PC. Now I want to make a slide show DVD using these
pics, which hopefully she can watch on her TV. I have been thru the
IDVD tutorial a couple of times (I'm running OS X.II.VI) and I'm
wondering if the picture quality will improve with large file sizes.
The tutorial suggests that the pictures should be 800x600 pixels. It
seems to me that this would result in a low quality picture on a large
screen TV (or a very small picture). Has anyone had any experience with
slide show DVD's ? Advice and info will be appreciated.

H Jenkins
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

In article <hjenkins-E3BAC5.10235901072003@netnews.attbi.com>,
Howard Jenkins <hjenkins@attbi.com> wrote:

I recently burned a CD of photos for a relative, only to find that she
has a clutzy PC that has limited ram, and can only put up 256 colors.
The photos are high res (3-6 MB compressed) and there is no way she can
view them on her PC. Now I want to make a slide show DVD using these
pics, which hopefully she can watch on her TV. I have been thru the
IDVD tutorial a couple of times (I'm running OS X.II.VI) and I'm
wondering if the picture quality will improve with large file sizes.
The tutorial suggests that the pictures should be 800x600 pixels. It
seems to me that this would result in a low quality picture on a large screen TV (or a very small picture). Has anyone had any experience with slide show DVD's ? Advice and info will be appreciated.

Keep in mind that the limiting factor here will be the television, not
the source images. American TV resolution is less than 640x480. So
iDVD will be scaling all of your images down to what a television can
support.

If you want more control, you can use iMovie to make a video out of the images. That gives you more control over timing, transitions, titling
and soundtrack. And the quality should be equivalent to an iDVD slide
show. It's more work, but the results are worth it.

--
Hank Shiffman http://www.disordered.org
Have Opinion, Will Travel hank@disordered.org Mountain View, California
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

In article <hjenkins-E3BAC5.10235901072003@netnews.attbi.com>,
Howard Jenkins <hjenkins@attbi.com> wrote:

... I want to make a slide show DVD using these pics, which hopefully
she can watch on her TV. I have been thru the IDVD tutorial a couple
of times (I'm running OS X.II.VI) and I'm wondering if the picture
quality will improve with large file sizes. The tutorial suggests
that the pictures should be 800x600 pixels. It seems to me that this
would result in a low quality picture on a large screen TV (or a very
small picture).

No matter what size pictures you use, when they're displayed on your TV they'll be only 720x480. That's the resolution of DVD video, and it's
closely related to the limits of the NTSC video format used by American televisions. Even a large-screen TV can't handle resolutions much
larger than that, unless it's an HDTV -- and DVD came before HDTV.

Computers use square pixels, while DVDs use rectangular pixels, so iDVD
always has to scale your photos. Larger pictures will scale down
better, but beyond a certain size there won't be any noticeable
difference. A 1024x768 photo may look better on DVD than an 800x600
photo, but a 2048x1536 photo will probably be indistinguishable from a 1280x960 photo.
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system


The limiting factor is the "video" factor of TV itself - everything
degrades once it passes through a video circuit into a TV - that's why
poor fools who dub even a high quality VHS video tape into their
computer and then burn it to DVD are always disappointed that it never
looks as clean a factory made DVD. The interlacing scan lines kill clean whites, too.
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