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.
9 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
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