Creating still images from DVD

StudioB wrote on 5/1/2004, 12:25 PM

What is the best way to extract still images from a DVD for usage within Vegas or other NLE software ?
I have a DVD with hundreds of test patterns - some of these I would like to use for testing my gear.
What I did up to now is use the capture function in Power DVD then import the image in MS paint and save as BMP, TIFF, JPG or PNG.
I noticed that these formats produce different results in Vegas when using the vectorscope and waveform display.
Which format would be the most accurate ?

Boris

Comments

riredale wrote on 5/1/2004, 2:43 PM

There are several other ways I can think of.

The simplest would be to feed your DV camcorder with a DVD player output. Once on tape, then just bring it into Vegas, and pull your stills from that. The advantage is that it's very simple. The drawback is that there is some loss in quality going from MPEG2 to analog to DV. But not much.

The fancier way is to load your DVD files into your hard drive, find out which .vob file you need (probably VTS_01_1.VOB), rename it to .mpg, and hopefully it will load onto the Vegas timeline. Then you can pull your stills from it.

For a test pattern I would probably save using a bmp, tiff, png, or gif format. If the test image is photograph-like, then jpg would be the best method. I'd be curious to learn which of the extraction methods delivers the most accurate results, but would assume the vob method would.

Jsnkc wrote on 5/1/2004, 3:01 PM

nevermind :)

B_JM wrote on 5/1/2004, 3:02 PM

you can load the vob directly into vegas timeline -- no renamign required ..

but vegas is not that great on single image out ..

a faster way would be to load the vob into virtualdubMOD and save images - which is extremly fast and high quality -- shift-1 saves each frame that is being displayed to your chosen dir.

gif is a terrible format for dvd images - jpeg at 100% is pretty good. But a targa or bitmap is higher quality.

Avoid png's if you can ....

really targas or 100% quality jpegs are very common ... and fast to use in vegas -- at least they were in vegas 4

StudioB wrote on 5/2/2004, 7:16 AM

Thanks for your replies.
I tried VirtualdubMOD and it seems to be the perfect tool for my application.
Regarding resolution and quality I have do to some more tests.

Boris