My wife asked me to put together a slide show of some of her digital photos. In my past experience, the results in this type of project proved to be disappointing. When watching the videos in full tv screen it reveals much pixelation and blurring. I obviously need to understand image resolution better. My assumption is: the higher the resolution the sharper the image. How does image size factor in? I never notice any difference in quality when either is adjusted. And finally, should these parameters match up to my video editing software settings? Any 'rules of thumb' to share?

The thing to realise is that video for tv is quite small.
regular DVD is only 720x576 (PAL) regardless whether the aspect ratio is 4:3 or 15:9 (lookup anamorphic)

HD is better, from
1280x720: 921,600 pixels (~0.9 Mpx) per frame
through
1440x1080 777,600 pixels
to
1920x1080 2,073,600 pixels (~2.1 megapixels [Mpx]) per frame

depending on how much you spent for your tv.

All much lower quality than any modern digital camera.

If you want a good no-frills slideshow maker try
http://www.photofilmstrip.org/1-1-Home.html

It will make the best of downscaling your images

I surmise that the viewing experience depends solely on what piece of crap you're watching it on. Thanks for the slideshow maker suggestion, but I need to layer 2 audio clips over each other which requires me to use my video editor.

If you are converting it to an actual video, then it is likely either the video editor downsampling/pixelating the source images, or even video compression artifacts depending on your video output format.

What is the video editor you are using?

-Rob A>

Rob, I'm using VideoPad Pro which has all the features I'm looking for. Output formats avi, mov, mp4, etc. There are a few resolution presets and film rates I've experimented with, and I've followed the guidelines for each of them. My question would be how can I prepare my images using GIMP for better viewing in the transition to video?

The general rule is the higher the resolution the better (with source images). Leave it up to the video software to downsample as necessary to fir the target.

-Rob A>

That was my original thought, a little more trial and error may be needed. Thanks.

Here's a thought. Picasa is a pretty good slideshow tool especially if you need to match music to length. Use Picasa Movie features, export to VideoPad to add extra audio tracks and fine tuning.

warning** Boring video talk **warning.

I sort of suggested that earlier on, but that appears to be too easy a solution. I always edit video with no audio then mux the audio in afterwards, but that is the traditional way and can be tedious.

We still do not know what format the OP intends to use and what is the playback device.
Obviously DVD format played on a 60" plasma NeverTheSameColor widescreen TV is not going to look very good just because of small format and the hardware anamorphic scaling.

I do a good bit of video editing and the saving grace is always motion. If the picture moves you do not notice the defects. That is why the Ken Burns effect works well with slideshows. A static image but if you move across it or zoom in/out it looks better.

I have had a look around and AFAIK none of the video editors (I use Womble in Win and Openshot in linux) pre-process the frames, the scaling is done with the encoder such as ffmpeg.

Next is aspect ratio. Nearly always these days TV widescreen 16:9. Not many photographs use this ratio so the usual solution is to letterbox for landscape images or pillar for portrait images. Again added during the encoding process.

OP could make a couple of tests but I would say do all the cropping (or letterboxing/pillaring) and scaling to the target frame size (whatever that might be) first in Gimp, then use these images to render the video. See if it makes a difference.

Then there is the question of what video codec can be played on the TV. I have a HDMI player but it only plays either mpeg or Divx avi. No chance of 1920x1080 mp4. A whole new can of worms...best of luck

I use the Windows Movie Maker on some projects for the initial sequencing and motion and transitions adding audio and enhancements on VideoPad. I'm disappointed that the Windows editor is, in some ways, more versatile. I've re-sized all the images on GIMP to 16:9 ratio, for some reason people take photos on the vertical rather than the horizontal (landscape), it makes for an 'inconsistent' appearance. I'm curious to see how it turns out, though. Thanks.

If you match pan and zoom transitions you'll find the vertical shots less annoying.

You will want the resolution of your chosen font to be twice that of your video. So for 720p video you should be working on a canvas that is 2560x1440 pixels or greater. This means you will probably be choosing font sizes of at least 200 pixels (whereas the largest font size on this page is about 30 pixels).