Correct resolution for photos for DVD?

[Grunberg]

I've read that the correct resolution for photos to be displayed on DVD is 480 in height. But I've also heard that these photos should be designed as 720x540, and then resize them to 720x480. What if I just started them in 720x480?

Does this make a difference? Someone please explain. Thanks!

[racer-x]

You heard correct for 4:3 AR (NTSC DVD). If you want to create a 16:9 Widescreen slideshow, start with 864 x 480 images and resize to 720 x 480.....................

[edDV]

It depends on the software you use. For programs like Photoshop, Premiere and Vegas send them a higher resolution and they will scale to DVD.

[ozymango]

What EdDV said -- you can give yourself lots of headaches when converting still images to DVD, based not just on image resizing but also pixel aspect ratio: A camera (digital) photograph has a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio, and a TV image (DV/DVD playback) is 1.093:1, so if you don't correct for that slight difference your converted images look a bit off. If you're working with Premiere than you can automatically set the aspect ratio to correct for that, and I'm guessing most photo-to-DVD software does this automatically, but who knows.

That being said, I wouldn't worry so much about resizing images unless and until you read the manual on whatever program you're using to convert to DVD, as they might have a preferred image size for conversion, or they might do all the scaling for you and you can just drop whatever you've got into the timeline. I use ProShow Gold for my slide/photo to DVD work and the re-scaling of the software is close enough to doing it in Photoshop (in terms of quality) that I can just pretty much drag and drop any image of any size into the program and it'll look good -- relatively speaking -- on a DVD. So I don't worry about the size, I just worry about having a nice picture to start with.