also
another newbie question

is interlacing mainly for stuff directly off the tv
what i mean is
if i tape off tv to a home vhs recorder, does that fix the tv interlacing?
then if i go vhs to vegas is there interlacing?
what of dv streams from dv camcorders?
i'm still wondering about stills,
if i get a blur, with all the switches you recomended, does that mean its a motion blur as oppossed to an interlacing problem/??

Richard,

Perhaps I should let Dennis respond to this, but I have been doing some still captures lately, as recently as today, and have some hands-on experience with this, and I owe my success in large part to instructions kindly given by SonicDennis.

Set your project property "Interlace" format to "progressive"-----do you mean "field order" to "(none) progressive scan" ??

Yes. Dennis means essentially that. To provide a little more detail on that step,

(1) In the Video Preview area in the lower right quadrant of your screen, click on the "Project Video Properties..." button (the one with a hand pointing to a rectangular list) located near the top lefthand of the Video Preview area. This will open a Project Properties dialog box.

(2) On the Project Properties dialog box, click the Video tab (if it is not already at the front) and in the "Field order:" field select "None (progressive scan)".

-- Burton --

thanx seeker

how do you think this prog and other video progs compare to a prog that is used mainly for capturing stills from vid?
"dv gate still" by sony seems to be giving the best results
ie no horizontal lines, slightly larger resolution...

or are there some plug ins that go with vegas?
or am i still not quite sussing vegas yet?

Richard,

and now having done those two things neither of the two capture buttons work?!?

I don't know what you mean by that. It is not necessary to select Interpolated Progressive Scan for the "Save Timeline snapshot to file" button to work. If you don't convert to interpolated progressive, the button still saves a timeline snapshot to a file. The snapshot will just be an interlaced picture, that will have the "comb effect" along the edges of objects that were moving horizontally. For a moving picture, the interlaced comb effect gives a beneficial motion blur that avoids perceptually jerky object motion. For a still picture, the comb effect just looks weird, and it is worthwhile taking steps to avoid it.

so after putting it to "progressive scan" [if that is correct] what does it go back to? and does de-interlace need to go back to none?

When I get ready to save a bunch of still pictures I just go through the necessary steps to set up for the frame grabs, save the pictures, and then close the project without saving changes. That automatically leaves the project as it was before I started the "save stills" operation. When you reopen the project your stills will still be available in your media pool, in case you want to use them in your video editing. I find that saving stills is a good way to "mine" my footage for "retroactive snapshots". I usually open them in Photoshop for some improvements and for printing. With a little Photoshop magic, you can get some decent 8x10s from your footage, and 5x7s and 4x6s are progressively easier. But you could use the stills in your video as well.

-- Burton --

don't know why the capture stills thing didn't work but it's fine now

anything special you do in photoshop?
my mate uses another photo editing prog for his photoghraghy work,so he's used to removing acne and changing light and contrast
but is there anything that helps resolution and pic quality?

Richard,

how do you think this prog and other video progs compare to a prog that is used mainly for capturing stills from vid?

We started out using Pinnacle's Studio DV on my wife's computer, and all you have to do in Studio DV is click a save frame button. It automatically uses one field of the interlaced picture, interpolates the gaps between all the scan lines, adjusts for pixel shape, and even gives you the option of picking whether you want the picture to be 320x240, 640x480, or 1500x1125 pixels. For the first few hundred frame grabs I did in Studio DV, I picked 1500x1125 pixels because that was bigger and Studio DV seemed to do a decent job of upsampling. However, I soon realized I had tied up several Gigs of my wife's hard drives with those over-sized frame grabs, which was becoming a space problem. So I switched to saving frame grabs at 640x480 pixels, and did the upsampling in Photoshop, where I had better tools (including Genuine Fractals) and more control for upsampling. Incidentally, Studio DV saves frame grabs as your choice of BMP, JPG, PCD, PCT, RLE, TGA, TIF, or WMF. I always picked BMP. For a frame grabber, Studio DV is a dream (although its captures always seemed to drop some frames.) As a video editor, Studio DV is pretty lightweight. For example, my Sonic Foundry VideoFactory could pan and scan over a large still image, but Studio DV can't do that. However I soon felt limited by VideoFactory and was glad for the opportunity to upgrade it to Vegas Video 3.

"dv gate still" by sony seems to be giving the best results ie no horizontal lines, slightly larger resolution...

I am not familiar with that product. But I am perfectly satisfied with Vegas Video 3 for stills. Well, not perfectly. I find the limitation to JPG and PNG to be rather restrictive. Vegas does not give you a JPG quality option, and the Vegas JPGs are about one tenth the size and one tenth the quality of the JPGs that I save from Photoshop. I miss being able to save frame grabs in BMP, because my stitching software requires BMPs so, when I stitch a sequence of video stills from a pan into a panorama, I have to bring the images into Photoshop to change them to BMPs suitable for the stitching software.

However, that is a fairly minor annoyance, because I usually bring them into Photoshop anyway, but still it couldn't be too hard for Sonic Foundry to add BMP as a still image save option. I currently use PNG because it is lossless. I think my Vegas Video 3 stills are better than my Studio DV stills. I think Vegas does a smoother job of interpolation, and my Vegas stills are 654x480 pixels vs 640x480 pixels for my Studio DV stills. The extra 14 pixels of image width is much appreciated, because it gives you a little more leeway for cropping to get a 4x6 print. The Vegas stills require less vertical cropping to get the 4x6 aspect ratio.

or are there some plug ins that go with vegas? or am i still not quite sussing vegas yet?

Vegas has a lot to it, so you should be patient with yourself. I don't know of any plug-ins to simplify the still capture process, but I don't think you need any. After you get the "hang of it", it is really quite easy, and works very well. There are a bunch of plug-ins that can be very useful. One of them is the Noise Reduction 2.0 plugin for dealing with audio noise. Some of my footage has serious noise problems so I am quite happy that I could take advantage of a recent offer to upgrade to Sonic Foundry 6 and Noise Reduction 2. I will be using both to work on my sound tracks, where I have some challenging problems. I am of the opinion that the sound tracks are at least as important as the video tracks, and probably more. Another reason to use Vegas. Now if Vegas would just support surround sound... Hint. Hint.

-- Burton --

Richard,

is interlacing mainly for stuff directly off the tv

I am not sure what you mean by "fix the tv interlacing". The TV has interlacing. So does the VHS tape in the VCR. The interlacing is not something that needs to be "fixed."

then if i go vhs to vegas is there interlacing? what of dv streams from dv camcorders?

Yes, taking VHS to Vegas moves interlacing into Vegas. And most DV camcorders have interlaced video and when you capture from them you get interlaced DV AVI files. If you had one of those rather rare and expensive progressive camcorders and you recorded with it in the progressive mode then you would import progressive DV into Vegas.

i'm still wondering about stills,

Yes, once you interpolate to progressive, any remaining blur is attributable to something else. It could be due to motion, either by an object in the scene, or by the camcorder itself, or it could be that the lens was not focused properly.

-- Burton --

Thanks, seeker!

This might interest you as well:

http://www.salientstills.com/product/product_intro.html

It uses multiple frames to capture more resolution. BIG stills from video. I've never tried it myself.

///d@

Dennis,

> This might interest you as well:

You have a better chance of trying it than I do. You might be able to get Sonic Foundry to get VideoFOCUS for evaluation of the technology. The price of VideoFOCUS has to be very, very high. Most of the "users" are major publications. The "light" version of VideoFOCUS, bundled with a workstation, is nearly $10,000. The "regular" version of VideoFOCUS must be very pricey. I guess the fact that VideoFOCUS only runs on Windows NT 2000 and Mac OS-X is kind of a secondary limitation, in view of the stratospheric price point.

However, the pictures from the VideoFOCUS product are simply fantastic! Several other much less costly products have done a similar thing, but on a much smaller and less impressive scale. Several analog still capture devices (Snappy for example) increased the resolution of the captured still by cross-correlating several sequential frames. And I have VideoBrush Photographer, a now discontinued panoramic image stitcher that can cross-correlate two or more frames to "res up" an image by a factor of two. But that is "small potatoes" compared to what VideoFOCUS can do.

Eventually this technology will "trickle down" to a consumer-priced product, and I can hardly wait for that to happen. Of course by that time we may have affordable HDTV camcorders, taking megapixel frames, so getting good stills from frame grabs may be much easier by then.

I don't know what the finances, legalities, and other practicalities might be, but it would be super-neat if Sonic Foundry licensed this VideoFOCUS technology for inclusion in Vegas Video 4. Or as some kind of extra price add-on product for Vegas Video 4. Actually, from a marketing gamesmanship standpoint, it might be better to make it a standard feature, so everybody would help pay for it. Making it a separate add-on would tend to isolate it into a market niche where it might not thrive, something like the Soft Encode product was.

VideoFOCUS, or something like it, is definitely on my wish list.

-- Burton --