Thought I'd report the waste of a perfectly good Sunday afternoon trying to create a slideshow DVD.
After using iMovie 4 and exporting to iDVD 4 only to find out that it wouldn't burn to my third-party DVD writer, I tried using my Roxio suite Motion Picture HD (2.1.2) and Toast 7 Titanium applications (fully upgraded).
I did like the options for motion and slide framing, and preview quality better in Motion Picture HD than that of iMovie 4, but I could never get past the dreaded crash while exporting to DV for Toast. Well actually, I did once get through without crashing, but that was after I disabled the motion eye-candy (which I really like). However, I found that even that was flawed as the DVD created by Toast produced blank photos after about 20 of my 138 slides.
My Mac: Dual G5 1.8ghz, 1gig mem, 50-60 gigs free HD space, OSX 10.4.8 with latest patches (as of March 2007)
So here I am looking at these two options to make slide show DVDs with motion and music...
(1) upgrade to Toast 8 and hope for the best
(2) upgrade to iLife to get iMovie 6 and iDVD 6 which now handles third party drives
I'm kind of leaning toward the iMovie route even though I think the Motion Picture HD/Toast process is easier and to the point for slide shows, but I'm not sure about the quality of output with iMovie/iDVD. I have not been impressed with the video quality (seems very low res and pixely).
Does anybody have anything good to say about iMovie 6/iDVD 6? Is the video quality better than older versions?