Q: best way to share an iMovie

Hi,

There's more than one way to do this.

You could share out your movie  to your desk top as a Mpeg-4 image, copy it to an external thumb drive, and then use a  laptop to play the movie on your TV with a HDMI cable connection.  I did it that way for a wedding and it worked great.  Make sure that the thumb drive is formatted for Apple -- Mac OS extended (journaled).   If it is not formatted for Apple, you can reformat the disc through with the Utility app on your Mac.

Another way is to burn it to a DVD, using an authoring program like iDVD or Toast,  and play it on TV through a DVD player.

There are ways to use iMovie Theater to share to other devices as well.  I have not used it for that purpose, but if you want to check it out you can visit this online iMovie link:  http://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.1/#/mov89ed857a8

As for sharing setting options, I think sharing out your movie as an Mpeg-4 under the "High" quality setting delivers excellent quality and it is a codec designed for viewing.  You also could share out as an image under the "Best (pro res)"

setting which delivers the best quality as a .mov, but the file size will be much larger than an Mpeg-4.   It would be your call, but you might not even be able to notice a quality difference between the two codecs for playing on a TV.    And then, of course, quality to a large extent will be determined by the resolution that you shoot the video with and the resolution of your TV screen.   

Hope this helps,

-- Rich