How to get the Best DVD quality
 

The footage is captured with a Canon XHA1 at the highest resolution.
Imported to iMovie HD, have also tried iMovie 09.
Encoded in iDVD at the professional quality, also tried best with no improvement.
Burned to a DVD. The result is very disappointing, photos with the Ken Burns effect have heat wave appearing lines radiating from high contrast leading edges, the general quality of the movie footage has poor resolution.
I have spent many hours on the phone with Mac Help line and all of the software tests are good, A Mac service center has tested the hardware and pronounced it A OK.
The quality is good when viewed in the edited version of iMovie before exporting to iDVD.
The project is only 19 minutes long. My computer is a iMac, 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667 MHZ DDRS SDRAM, operating system Mac OSX 10.5.6 which is current with all updates.
I am willing to buy or do whatever it takes to improve the quality of DVD's.
Please Help.
Thanks

DVDs are standard definition not HD like your original footage. The lines you report on the photos are the result of high resolution photos moving in a standard definition video space. For better quality you might try using Toast to make DVDs but only BluRay will come close to the original footage.

i must concur with William here. our eyes get so used to HD, both in editing, and watching programs on TV that ordinarily wouldn't interest us, but we watch just because they feature beautiful HD footage....i fought and fought with the same issue that you are. Blu Ray players are a bit more reasonably priced now, and you can burn HD on standard dvds with favorable results. no need to try to make dvd's look better than they are capable of. upgrade your viewing apparatus.

Chris

Thanks But
 

Thank you both William & Chris.
You mentioned Toast, I see that Toast 10 is now available in both the Standard and the Titanium and the Pro Model. Do you have a preference?
In iMovie HD settings File/Export/QuickTime/Expert Settings/Export there are 17 options listed. Does anyone know where to get a explanation of what these options are? Many of the options have choices after you choose them, for best DVD quality using Toast do you have any suggestions.
Thanks Guys
Kent

I think your wavy image is due to moving crisp stills across an interlaced screen. When I use the ken burns effect I keep my video progressive and burn with DVD studio pro. This will supposedly create an interlaced "480i" DVD. But when I view the DVD I can say for certain that it is not interlaced, because I see no horizontal lines. I've tested this with iDVD which also creates an interlaced 480i DVD. The quality is pretty similar, but when I watch this DVD I can see that iDVD actually forced visible interlace lines onto my progressive video. This creates the "moire" effect that I think you are seeing.
So I suggest that you make sure your imovie video is progressive, not interlaced. Then use a burning software that won't force lines onto it like iDVD does. I don't know imovie or toast well enough to help.

Use something else
 

I recommend you try to find something else for compression and DVD authoring rather than iDVD. I tested and tested it and had one production with high motion that I simply couldn't get a clean image out of. Finally upgraded to a Final Cut studio/Compressor/DVDSP workflow and couldn't be happier with the results. It seems iDVD is pretty inconsistant when it comes to compressing HDV footage. No doubt FCP with Compressor is a pricey option and their may be other programs that also do a good job with compression for SD DVDs (Toast?) but switching to a professional editing/compression/ & DVD authoring suite made all the difference for me.

If the end result is going to DVD, its in SD...
So, render to your local format (NTSC or PAL), interlaced file, 720 pixels wide, 8Mbps max bitrate, averaging to 6, with a two pass render.

HD delivery on disc is only BluRay at the moment...

Ben