iLife has always been the number one reason why I love the Mac so much, it was pretty much the reason why I switched to using Macs. There are many ways to go about making an iPhoto slideshow in iDVD, but you don’t get the same result with each different way. I discovered the best way to get a slideshow with the Ken Burns effect and background audio is to make a “Slideshow” in iPhoto and export to QuickTime. From there, you can import into iDVD and burn your slideshow. Here’s how I did it:
- Open iPhoto and make an album with all of the photos you want in the slideshow.
- Now select the “New Slideshow” button in the bottom toolbar, which will make another special album that is for slideshow purposes only. This is required if you want the Ken Burns effect with your slideshow.
- Edit the parameters of the new slideshow by setting background music, transition effects, Ken Burns, etc.
- Choose File - Export. I suggest using the highest quality setting (640×480) and export to the “Movies” folder in your Home directory. Then click “Export” and wait for iPhoto to finish the export.
- Open iDVD and the Movies folder where you saved the iPhoto slideshow.
- Drag the exported slideshow file into the iDVD frame, which will import the movie into your iDVD project.
- Dress up the DVD menus to your liking and burn. A major benefit of using the iPhoto export is that iDVD doesn’t have to re-encode the movie, so the burning process will not take too long.
You may ask why I didn’t just open iDVD and create a slideshow or maybe just use iMovie to create my slideshow. iDVD 6’s slideshow feature is much better than earlier versions of iDVD, but it is still in need of further improvement. iDVD caps the number of photos in a slideshow to 9,801 images (how did they get 9,801?), and iDVD doesn’t support the Ken Burns effect, which I think is crucial to making an entertaining slideshow. However, iMovie does support Ken Burns and doesn’t have a maximum number of photos, but iMovie takes a very long time to encode the photos, and it requires the user to manually setup the Ken Burns effect for each photo, which I think is ridiculous. Overall, the iPhoto slideshow export trick is the easiest and fastest way to get your memories on DVD to share.
29 Responses
karl keaney says:
hi there, having bought an imac recently i love the slideshow facility, however i have spent several days (and many dvds) trying to get decent results onto dvd to show on our dvd player, the results are horrible (these are also like this replaying my recorded dvds on the mac) i have burnt them at highest res but to no avail, is there additional software you could recomend to produce a decent slideshow playable away from the mac ?, yours hopefully, karl . Ireland.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
iMovie '08 makes custom slideshow production easy at Appleology says:
[...] with iLife ‘08, making a fully-customized Ken Burns DVD slideshow was impossible. The closest you could get to a fully-customized slideshow involved making an iPhoto slideshow with custom Ken [...]
August 8th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
freelance web development says:
You can apply the ken burns effect to the entire imovie project all at once. You do not need to apply it to each image manually (which would be totally insane). And then you can use other transitions as well… probably better than iPhoto.
September 4th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Sam Goldstein says:
With all the compression that takes place each time you go from iPhoto > iMovie >iDVD you lose lose lose quality of the original photo. There’s got to be a better way to get a real quality slide show that can retain that same or similar resolution. I haven’t found it yet, but let me know if you do. Resolution for DVD are only 720 lines (or something like that…) slides are much more…. over 2000pixels. At least that is what some of the “professional” advice I got from Apple.
October 7th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
seventhfury says:
Nice tips, I used to do this through iMovie and it took FOREVER. Nice to see that iPhoto has these capabilities, I never knew.
December 18th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Sarah says:
How do you get several songs on your slideshow? Any help?
April 14th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Appleologist says:
@Sarah: You’ll have to produce a GarageBand mix for that. Alternatively, you can use iMovie ‘08 as described in a more recent tutorial:
http://www.appleology.com/2007/08/08/imovie-08-makes-custom-slideshow-production-easy/
April 14th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Ryan Pavlik says:
if you’re exporting to a DVD, make the res 740×480 which is native NTSC DVD resolution and will give you the best quality - no resizing.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:54 am
DJ says:
How about making a slideshow or movie to upload to a website. Can iLife do that?
June 17th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
FatBob says:
Is there a way to move a slideshow made in iPhoto into iMovie?
I cannot seem to manage it, and as you seem to have better manipulation over the Ken Burns movement in iPhoto, I really do not want to have to do it all again!
For reference I need to add to iMovie to go on the end of a home movie…
Cheers
July 9th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Denise says:
I have an iPhoto slide show that I want to burn to a DVD. I seem to be unable to just import it as is, NO THEMES into iDVD and just burn it for use on a TV. Instructions on iDVD say you have to alter one of their themes to get a blank screen, but I’m unable to make just a black background and FILL the screen like my iPhoto slideshow looks in iPhoto. HELP, anyone with a suggestion?
August 19th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Andrea Brand says:
I have the same issue as Sam Goldstein - QUALITY of slides. I have tried creating slideshows in iDVD and iPhoto, but find that I get the most control of audio and visuals in iMovie. BUT then when I export to iDVD to burn I lose so much quality. Which is really sad because I spent alot of money renting a very high quality slide scanner to scan in my family’s old slides. The show is beautiful until I export. Any suggestions to getting the highest quality for slides when exporting?
October 16th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Andrea Brand says:
Just to clarify - I am exporting a slideshow from iMovie to iDVD. How do I maintain the quality of the still photos?
Andrea
October 16th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Andrea Brand says:
I just want to let everyone know that I just seriously improved the quality of the photos by:
in iMovie choose Share and then choose export to Quicktime. Then you find the “Options” button in that window, click this, then in the Video section click “Settings” button, then in the pull down “Compression Type” (and this is the important part) I selected “Photo-JPEG”. Apparently this compression type is for high res still photos. which means best for slideshows. So when I exported with this Photo-JPEG compression it looked so much better in iDVD.
That’s my solution. Hope it works for anyone else.
Andrea
October 16th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Lindro says:
I am scanning my family photos from about 1915 to today, fixing the damage of age with PhotoShop and tint-colorizing some of the good ones. I scan and save the photos in high res (300dpi) so that family members can make decent printouts. These are all stills. My next step is making a DVD slideshow but I can’t find a single thing about resolution.
1. Can I use the high res photos or do I resave them to 72 dpi?
2. Can family print off the IDVD slideshow?
3. Do I need to keep the photos in an IPhoto folder or can I use the family folder on my HD.
4. Although I’m strictly a Mac User for 2 decades, I use PowerPoint for professional slide presentations and know how to use the features. Can I import a PPS into IDVD or play it in my DVD player for TV?
November 26th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Rob says:
what a great thread - it seems many people are struggling with getting good quality slide shows out of iLife on to a DVD. I too am wrestling with this problem, I shoot photos for people and want to put them on DVD. Showing them on my iMac is great - they look sensational and the transitions and Ken Burns is smooth as silk, but put the same slide show to DVD via iMovie and the iDVD and it falls apart. I will try Andrea’s suggestion tonight and hope it works. Failing that it may be Fotomagico which is what some people suggest.
thanks all
Rob
November 26th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Jack Jennings says:
There exists a Mac slide show application that purports to solve the hi-resolution issue. It’s called “Fotomagico” and info can be found at http://www.boinx.com/fotomagico/. Has anyone tried this?
November 27th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Pohakulea Productions says:
iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD) is great if you want to produce something quickly or want to produce content for YouTube or MobileMe. However, it is not the best tool by any stretch for producing slideshows or movies for projection systems or large TVs. While Fotomagico does some things fairly well, I have found Photo to Movie, by LQ Graphics at http://www.lqgraphics.com/ to be the cat’s meow in slideshow production. It takes some time to both learn and use, but the level of control and motion that you can introduce via timeline and keyframe editing is phenomenal. As MacAddict says; “Photo to Movie is the deluxe ginsu knife set of digital slide shows, for when iPhoto and iMovie just won’t cut it. …” I have to agree.
December 17th, 2008 at 2:46 am
GaryWright says:
Two observations:
1. Lindro: forget about “resolution” - as in “72 dpi” or “300 dpi” - those numbers are for your printer, only, and mean nothing to a computer monitor or TV screen. In video, only pixels matter. For standard definition TV, no matter how many pixels your photo had to start with, it’s going to end up as 640×480 pixels on the screen.
2. In his book “iMovie4 & iDVD-The Missing Manual” David Pogue has this suggestion for avoiding poor quality slideshows from iMovie: Don’t let iMovie render the slideshow. (pages 452-4)
First, go to iMovie’s Preferences and turn on both “High quality” and “Enhanced video playback”.
If you click on iMovie’s “Create iDVD Project” (don’t), you will be notified: “Your movie contains still, slow motion and or reverse clips”; and if you click on “Render and Proceed” (don’t), then iMovie will render your still slides to video. Maybe more recent versions are better, but as of version 4, iMovie did not render photos very well.
Instead, Save and Quit iMovie, Open iDVD, then open the folder where you saved your iMovie project. Find the file with your project name, ending in “.mov.” - and drag that file into iDVD’s menu screen. Now, when you burn the disc, iDVD will render your stills to video with better results than if from iMovie.
I have not yet built a DVD slideshow with my new copy of iLife08, so I don’t know if this work-around is still necessary, but it gave me good results using iLife04.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Peter Sheppard says:
I also have the quality issue..and have tried Andrea`s suggestion with absolutely no improvement in the sharpness obtained from great images taken with my NikonD200. This is quite frustrating..anyone come up with a solution yet?I need to make a show for a wedding in two weeks, and what I`m getting from IDVD , I Movie, Toast, is not usable.
February 1st, 2009 at 9:06 am
Mark L says:
The issue doesn’t seem to be with the output of iMovie, but rather the input. It looks to me like iMovie only takes in the iPhoto images by compressing them, so changing the compression settings for export as Andrea suggested seemed to have no effect. Just comparing what I see of the image in iMovie with the same image in iPhoto before its import shows this plainly!
I’ve no idea how to get around this, as I’m not interested in burning a DVD - I want to have a showreel sequence of stills on my iWeb portfolio site. Further fiddling in ‘Streamclip’ etc makes no difference and there does not appear to be any settings for photo imports.
I guess this is where we all just bite the bullet and learn Final Cut. But no good for a project that has to be finished by tomorrow.
February 17th, 2009 at 1:41 am
Mark L says:
Ok so I’ve done some fiddling on the new iLife09 and i had to give up on the way iMovie imports stills and compresses them - no matter how high res I made the images originally, iMovie just crushes them until they literally bleed pixel artifacts.
Im not interested in iDVD because my eventual output is not to DVD, so I looked for another way round and it appears that importing stills as though they are movies means iMovie doesn’t do as much compressing… So i created a slideshow in iPhoto giving the images the highest possible onscreen time, NO DISSOLVE transition, just a straight cut, and then a CUSTOM EXPORT at the highest possible setting (1420×800).
Annoyingly iPhoto won’t give me the option to go wider than 16:9 (I have 2.35:1 screengrabs) so I’d have to resize all my original images to fit into a16:9 frame which gives me black letterboxing that I will probably eventually remove in ‘Streamclip’ or similar.
Now because I actually want to have the much better editing facility of iMovie for the slideshow (iPhoto is sooooooo limited!) I now import this slideshow Quicktime as a new event and chop each still out again and re-edit with all the dissolves and timings etc that was my original intention. The compression is less on this imported movie than it was on an imported still - its a bit of a cheat and a long way around, but really doesn’t take much more time sitting at the computer.
It’s up to the individual whether you prefer to grade the original images in iPhoto, in Photoshop or to then use iMovie’s color adjustments and effects. Different pics for me gave different results, depending on the contrast and shadow levels.
Now it’s not that there is no compression on the images now, just a lot less.
Think now I’m gonna brush up on FCPro.
February 17th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Mark L says:
Better still, Im just going to do everything in After Effects from now on.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Bill G says:
is there a way to a image displayed for less than 1 second?
February 19th, 2009 at 11:39 am
nono says:
easter decoration slideshow
April 15th, 2009 at 6:26 am
nono says:
i used to use
wondershare photo story platinum
April 15th, 2009 at 6:41 am
nadia says:
I made a slideshow of photos on iMovie08 and then transferred it to iDVD and burned the DVD. The ultimate goal is to watch it on a big TV, using a DVD player. When I watched it on my TV, it stopped a few times and the words were cut off on the sides of the photos. Any idea on how to make a sharp DVD play on a TV?
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:25 am
Jared P. says:
I just started following this discussion b/c I am working on the same kind of project everyone else seems to be doing. I’m doing a graduation slideshow and there are multiple graduates. I could have used iMovie to do the whole thing but with iLife ‘09 updates to iPhoto, making a slideshow was much quicker. I had originally exported each slideshow to a file then imported to iMovie and had the same results - pixelation! I came up with a solution…I don’t know what made me think to do this, but it WORKED!!!
In iPhoto, export the slideshow to a Quicktime movie file. BUT, before saving, click “Options” and a Movie Settings box will come up. Click “Settings.” Next is Standard Video Compression Settings. I made the Compression Type “None”, changed the Compressor: Quality to “Best” - I left the Compressor selection as “Millions of Colors+”. Click “OK” and you’re back to Movie Settings.
I clicked the “Size” button and changed the size of my output to 1920×1080 HD. I also check-marked the box for “Preserve Aspect Ratio using:” and chose “Letterbox” b/c that’s what I want to appear on the screen.
I hope this helps many others!
April 26th, 2009 at 12:54 am
reddogg says:
I produced a prime example of an iLife DVD back in 2007. It came out superb but I have not produced anything since. It’s beyond sad that its 2009 and there is no iDVD-HD (or some such marketing term). We have compact cameras taking 4000×3000 rez photographs, mixing them with 256kb/sec audio tracks and the only export is on to DVD, a 10 year old technology? I still have my slide show and present it from time to time, and usually I open the raw iDVD content and display it pre-rendered and uncompressed. LOL how lame is that? Everyone’s gripes on this thread are completely legitimate. The transition from iPhoto to iMovie is full of fail, and iDVD is totally LAST CENTURY!
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
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