3rd Party DVD burner to Create HD Quality Slideshows

Hi

If so, what is a good HD DVD o purchase?

On what do You intend to play the HD DVD ?

No standard DVD-Player can playback HD-DVD only a few very rare Toshiba player were made to be able to use this very rare format.

All DVDs from Hollywood or iDVD - is same and only interlaced SD-Video - It's DVD Standard.

The quality on Your DVD depends on several things.

• file format (video codec) delivered to iDVD

• video editor used to create this Export file

• way it was sent to iDVD

• brand of DVD used

• type of DVD used

• burn speed on DVD-burner

An if You persist on HD-Quality then You need to do a Blu-Ray disk one way or another.

To do this You can use Your Mac and it's DVD-burner for very short BD-DVDs - BUT

• Standard Macs can not play these - nor Blu-Ray Disks

• You need a BD-Player as a PlayStation 3 to view them

• You need Roxio Toast™ 11 Pro incl. BD-component to make them

• a DVD can hold about 20-30 minutes in BD-quality

• and a Blu-Ray-burner and disks - If You want full Blu-Ray Disks with several hours of material.

Still I create my SlideShows in FinalCut and burn them with iDVD and get a very good result

iMovie'08 to 11 - can not deliver 100% interlaced SD-Video over to iDVD but discard every second line resulting in severe quality loss

Sharing to iDVD - from any iMovie versions also results in severe quality loss.

From

iMovie'08 to 11 - I "Share to Media Browser" and as LARGE (Not HD or other resolution as this too degrade the quality)

iMovie HD6 - Just import movie icon into iDVD - best possibly result

FCE/P - Export as QuickTime movie - NO QUICKTIME CONVERSION ! - and not self contained (not important but saves time)

just some thoughts

Yours Bengt W

You can buy Roxio Toast which also offers a BluRay plugin (separately I believe) so you can burn high quality on a regular DVD, but you will only get about 25 minutes on a regular DVD. I purchased it originally and did several tests with different settings of the same 60 sec. movie. I could not see a difference on my 720p HDTV using the plugin. I generally use Canons (one shoots in 720p, the other in 1080p), use iMovie HD (old version 6) because it is the only version that processed lossless; for good quality slide shows, I use Photo to Movie because I do not care for the Ken Burns effect (zoom in/out) in either iPhoto or iMovie. When I am done with either/both, I create a new project in iDVD, add a customized theme (layering 3 - 5 video layers for special effects in FCE), my movie(s) and slidwshow(s), "burn" the finished project to a Video_TS folder, and then burn with Toast on either the internal or my external burner. The Video_TS folder is then copied to an external drive for safekeeping/future burns.

@ Bengt Do you know if I can just drop my mts files straight into iDVD? My iMac doesn't come with iDVD wondering if I should buy it.

@babowa (I could not see a difference on my 720p HDTV using the plugin.) Do you mean you couldn't see any difference between the DVD version and the blu ray disc?

i don't know if the current plug in is different, but when I tried it, you used regular DVDs not Bluray. Using just the plugin, I could not really see a difference. I am farsighted though which means I sit farther away from the screen than others which also makes a difference with how much detail you see I think? In any case, they looked about the same to me.