correcting aspect ratio after frame grab

rs170a wrote on 11/10/2009, 8:46 AM
As you all know, when Vegas does a frame grab (NTSC DV), the resulting frame is now 655x480.
I know I can bring this back into Vegas and it'll automatically correct it but what do I have to do to bring it into (shudder!!) Premiere and have it look like the original image?
I've tried resizing it back to 720x480 but the resulting image is not the same as the original was.
I'm hoping that I've just overlooked something simple here.

edit: if I set my Project Properties to Square (PAR of 1.000 instead of 0.9091) before I do a frame grab, this seems to work.
Is this the right/only solution?

Mike

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/10/2009, 9:25 AM
no, that's not right!

Premiere's got it wrong if when you change the PAR it's not fixed. Infact, they've always had PAR wrong, haven't they?

you need to change the image's PAR to 1.0 in premiere.
MPM wrote on 11/11/2009, 10:20 AM
Image grabs can be a PITA...

For DVD menu work Vegas IMHO does better text compositing than DVDA or P/Shop, but you then run into the problem of creating a mask for button highlights. Haven't tried it the *old* or regular way in 9 [habits are hard to break I guess], but to get a 16:9 match-up need to actually render stills on the timeline to mpg2, then put that mpg2 on the timeline of a new project & grab that.

At any rate, always found image grabs to be somewhat glitch prone, & IMHO even if you forget anything aspect, setting to 1 &/or turning off, triple check your results, whatever NLE or player you use. More than once I've rendered a few frames to avi just to have V/Dub convert to images as a check of sorts.
rs170a wrote on 11/11/2009, 11:46 AM
I ended up talking to the instructor who was requesting this feature, explained my potential dilemma and he said that they're going to be using After Effects, not Premiere and that 655 X 480 would be fine.
Thanks for the ideas/suggestions folks.

Mike
rmack350 wrote on 11/11/2009, 10:42 PM
Instead of framing the question as right way/wrong way maybe it should just be a question of how to get the result you want.

You can always get a single 720x480 still out of vegas by copying the current frame to the clipboard and then pasting it in an image editing program. If you need a 720x480 image sequence then the Debugmode frameserver will do that. If you want a PAR-adjusted image sequence then Vegas 9 can do that natively. And, as you found out, you can also save the current frame as a 720x480 image file if you change your project properties.

I tend to copy and paste into photoshop from Vegas. I do it all day at work and copy/paste is fine since all images are going straight to photoshop anyway. It actually saves me some steps over saving PNGs out of Vegas.

Very few NLE's expect a still frame to be ~654.55x480. Most (by convention, not by good math) expect the image to either be 640x480(square pixels) or to be 720x480 (non-square). Whatever the requirement, the point is to know how to get a still out of Vegas that meets your requirements.

And of course we're just talking about an NTSC SD DV frame here.

Rob Mack