[chrisutley]

I sat down to make a fancy slideshow presentation with iMovie today, and realized that it was not nearly as simple as I had anticipated.

I have about 300 photos in iPhoto of all different sizes, and figured I'd just willy nilly be dragging them into the timeline and everything would be just swell. I didn't take into account how iMovie might handle different sized images.

Some of you experienced iMovie folks probably already know what my problem is. Many of the photos are distorted because iMovie is scaling them up or down. I had hoped that smaller images would appear in their actual size, with a black border around them. Not the case... Everything looks gross. Do I need to manipulate/resize everything before I bring it into iMovie, and if so what size? So I'm screwed if I have a small image that cannot be resized without degrading the quality?

On a related note. I haven't used iMove in a long time. I noticed tonight that might titles look horrible, as if the anti-aliasing went berserk. Is this only when I am working in the timeline? Will they look better when I export the movie?

I feel like a complete loser. I remember a few years back, I used iMovie for the first time and had a fun movie completed in a few hours with all the bells and whistles. Today I couldn't make a simple slideshow with a soundtrack.

[zigzag]

I've only used iMovie2, so there might have been changes, but as far as I know iMovie has a fixed resolution of 640x480, so any stills you import will be converted to that. If it's any consolation, the pics will look better on a TV than they do on your monitor.

If you want to preserve smaller pics, use Photoshop or the equivalent to create a 640x480 background in the color of your choice, then past the photo onto that background and import the whole image into iMovie. You can do this with larger, oddly proportioned photos as well if you want white fill instead of black.

Not sure what to tell you about the titles - might have to experiment.

[euchomai]

iMovie is a pain to work in with photos as you have learned. The fix is to make the slideshow in iPhoto and save it as a quicktime movie. Import the quicktime movie into iMovie and add your music and titles.

Hope that works for you.

[chrisutley]

That's a great idea. Thanks for the info guys.

Originally posted by euchomai:
iMovie is a pain to work in with photos as you have learned. The fix is to make the slideshow in iPhoto and save it as a quicktime movie. Import the quicktime movie into iMovie and add your music and titles.

Hope that works for you.