de-interlace stills possible?

jimcho wrote on 1/29/2002, 12:11 AM

When capturing a still image from a fast moving DV scene, I get interlacing artifacts, especially if panning or zooming the image.

Is there a way to de-interlace the image when it is captured? If not, are there any freeware programs anyone is using with good results?

Comments

discdude wrote on 1/29/2002, 6:41 AM

In Vidcap 2.5, there is an option under Options/Preferences/Capture to "deinterlace when capturing stills" so you can capture deinterlaced stills directly from your DV cam.

If you want to deinterlace the whole video, you have to use another program. I recommend VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org). VirtualDub is great, especially for captures of VHS tapes. Not only does VirtualDub deinterlace, but it contains filters for noise reduction, sharpen/blur, color adjustment, etc. I actually capture and process all video in VirtualDub before bringing it over to VF. Best of all, it's free. The only downside is that it doesn't natively support WDM capture devices.

Of course, if you already have a bunch of captured interlaced stills, VirtualDub won't help. Instead, I use Photoshop 5.0 LE to prep stills. I haven't worked with it's replacement, Photoshop Elements, but it's supposedly better. Photoshop Elements isn't free but it is

jimcho wrote on 1/29/2002, 8:25 AM

Thanks. Does this de-interlace option only work in the Vidcap application or does it apply to the capture feature on the timeline?

SonyEPM wrote on 1/29/2002, 9:35 AM

set the project to "progressive" temporarily and you should be able to get better screen grabs from interlaced footage.

jimcho wrote on 1/29/2002, 10:32 AM

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

jimcho wrote on 1/30/2002, 10:01 PM

Thanks SonicEPM, that worked great! Stills are now solid and jitter-free.

One more question. Is there anything wrong with leaving the project in progressive mode if I intend to render in MPEG format? I keep forgetting to set it back.

I'd also like to request that still capture from the timeline be more trouble-free. It's a hassle to always make sure that the preview window is set to best quality and displayed at project size to get a full size capture. There should be an option to always capture stills at project size and one for always capture in progressive mode.