The dpi can be anything you want to set it to since dpi is really meaningless in video. What you probabably want is more resolution or a larger image size. By default, Vegas creates stills the same size as the preview window. You can bypass this and make it save stills at the full resolution of the video. In Vegas 3, right-mouse-button click on the preview window and choose "display at project size". In Vegas 4 change the display mode from Auto to Full. You'll now get full size 654x480 (NTSC) or 787x576 (PAL) stills.

Set to best(full) and you'll get a BIGGER picture. (655x480) A higher resolution one? No.

As billyboy stated...and as I stated- you cannot increase the resolution of video past 720 x 486 @ 72 DPI or 10" x 6.75" @ 72 dpi. You will have a hard time using this image for a VHS box...unless you are willing to sacrafice quality. The answer to your direct question- cannot be done for large print areas unless you are printing 2.4 inches by 1.6 inches at 300DPI!

That sucks:( But thank you all for your help.

Well, that depends on your definition of resolution. It can mean two different things: pixels per image, and pixels per unit of measure. DPI or dots per inch measures how many pixels in a unit of measure, in this case an inch. This measurement really has no meaning in video; it only applies to scanning and print media. It makes more sense to use the word resolution to refer to the whole image size, such as 720x480 pixels.

So, setting to full will give a bigger picture with more resolution. How large this picture prints on paper is determined by what DPI setting you give this image when printing. 654x480 printed at 72dpi will be 9x6.67 inches. Print this same image at 300dpi and it will only be 2.18x1.6 inches. Note that dpi is independant of resolution, but both together determine how large the image will print. I think that no matter what image size you have Vegas use when saving a still, it will be set to 72dpi. You can change this after the fact in whatever image editing/printing software you use.

Sorry Ryu... video people have lived with this problem for a long time. However, I cannot recall the exact process...but a fiery and ripp software comes to mind- where I have seen a video frame blown up into a poster that actually looked great from a distance (not close up)

The old Snappy™ by Play could capture 1600x1200 stills from NTSC video. Somehow my captures never looked as sparkling as their propoganda, but it did work. I've heard that there are some utilities out there that use the same algorithms. It requires summing several frames together though, and depended on the idea that each frame would show slightly different details from the frames before and after. Supposedly it could collect additional details from each frame and composite them together. Of course, this requires moving video of a still scene, not just one still frame.

There are few things you could try and see if it suits your needs. I have actually run into this over the years where a producer/director has not had stills taken on set, or have not had stills done during "the" action scene. So they do frame grabs, most of the time these were not used for the main image but for the smaller 'snapshot' images on the back of the cover, or one the side. In any case - now days there are a lot of little tricks and prgrams you can try -

First is software called
VFZoom. Really basic description is that is will resize an image with no loss in quality. (according to Celartem - "Zoom image areas up to 1200% with no loss of clarity") But I do not think this changes your DPI however, but it may get you what you need. IE- Take your 72 DPI image and bring it into your Quark Express layout at 50% of the original size and you will have basically 144 DPI.

Next is a free little utility called AVI2BMP that will load up your entire clip and convert each frame to a BMP image. You can scroll through and pick the frame you want. It works very well IMHO. Down sides are that the program is not being developed anymore and the latest (last) version was in French only. Also this will *not* change your DPI at all, but I have found it gives decent output for bringing into Photoshop to play with.

The next item I think is only available as a plug-in for Premiere but it was developed as a solution for exactly what you are asking. You place the plug-in on a clip and you can output a high-res file of the frame you want. It is called VideoPics.

Something you need to keep in mind is that you will run into more problems if you take any image and just enlarge it vs. having an image and making it smaller. So if you do a full frame export from VV and make it smaller in your layout, as I mentioned above, you my be ok. That is just a simple comment because if you are going to have your video sleeve done at a real printer you are into a whole new ballgame. You need everything to be at their specs, CMYK, probably layed out in Quark Xpress, all TIFF images and so on. Chances are a simpe frame grab will not work for that and you will need to use something like Video Pics as a first step.

If you have the money the other option is to take your master video to a place and have them do a scan of that frame - a scan onto film. THere used to be a place on Melrose Ave in hollywood, Ca that did this and I have forgotten the name right now. But you could give them either a frame grab, a layout in Tiff format, or bring them a video and they would make a high res transparency. It used to about $45 for a 4x5 film transparency from a file. From Betacam it was about $100 I believe.

Hope some of that helps.

A bit long winded but on point.

http://megamyth.homestead.com/imageres.html

DPI is not really the way you should view a video frame. Just think of the frame as having pixel dimensions: 720x480 in ntsc-DV. These are "non-square" pixels so the image will look stretched in photoshop and in print. You can size down to 654x480 or, since the goal is to increase the dimensions, you could size up to 720x528. You create some pixels there but it still works fine.

As everyone has said, DPI is what you make it. If you set the dpi of the 720x528 still to 720dpi then the image will print to be an inch wide. If you set it to 72DPI it'll be 10 inches wide.

The frame grab is also coming from an interlaced frame. If there's movement then it may never be very sharp.

As filmy has said, there may be some processes out there that can produce a good image at a higher res. They all have to interpolate new pixels where no pixels have gone before but, evidently, some programs excel at it.

The simplest thing to try is to use photoshop to resize the image. At least you get a benchmark to start at.

Rob Mack

I frequently use a plug-in in photoshop called Genuine Fractals. It allows for an almost lossless resizing of any photo to any size with incredible clarity. I recently created a backdrop from a scanned 35mm slide that is 6 feet by 8 feet and the quality of the enlargement was excellent. I printed it on my HP755 using a program called posterworks.

There ya go. And there's a trial version too.

The light version is $50.00 US and it goes all the way up to $300.00 for a version with tools aimed at printed ouput.

Haven't tried it, can't vouch for it, but the idea is that there are tools out there to produce good enlargements.

Thanks TRS80 (as in the old Trash80 computer?)

Rob