How to get a high res. photo from my footage

bassam wrote on 7/31/2007, 6:11 PM
I shot a documentary in the Himalayas and was counting on being able to use the footage shot on the panasonic DVX-100a to get promotional photos for print - which need to be in 300 dpi - we only have our video footage shot at 24 frames a sec. - the project is fully editied and Vegas did everthing we wanted - very pleased with the easy of use of the software.

Does any one know how I can get a high resolution photo from either Vegas 6 or architect? or from the DVD itself - any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. It's just a little hard to get back there now for stills!

Comments

farss wrote on 7/31/2007, 6:18 PM
The DV footage from any DV camera is either 720x576 or 720x480 pixels, period. So with a little maths you can workout how big the image will be at 300dpi.
There is some software around that seems to be able to do some fancy interpolation to higher resolutions but results are variable.

Bob.
Chienworks wrote on 7/31/2007, 6:56 PM
Once again, "dpi" is utterly meaningless in this context. What size picture does the publisher want? If they'll be happy with a 2x1.5" photo at 300dpi then you're all set. If they didn't indicate a size then 300dpi means absolutely nothing.

As Bob mentioned, the frames from your video will be rather low resolution and that's what you're stuck with. If you need the images to be, say, 10x7.5" then printing them from your video frames will result in a resolution of about 64dpi for NTSC or 75dpi for PAL. You can of course use any photo editor to resize these to 300dpi at 10x7.5", but the results won't be any better than leaving them as they are.
Coursedesign wrote on 7/31/2007, 7:13 PM
You can of course use any photo editor to resize these to 300dpi at 10x7.5", but the results won't be any better than leaving them as they are.

That is not quite true, and if you can use the best tool for the job, currently Genuine Fractals 5, you can do much better.

You can see the difference between Photoshop's bicubic resizing and the leading sharpening packages at http://www.designpreference.com/reviews/software/genuinefractals5.html#compare and judge for yourself.

John_Cline wrote on 7/31/2007, 7:52 PM
I had been using Genuine Fractals in Photoshop for years, but recently I've had better results using Alien Skin's Blow Up.

John
farss wrote on 7/31/2007, 8:04 PM
Reading thorugh that and looking at the results Photozoom looks better and isn't too expensive, especially if you haven't got PS.

However there can be another approach. If you have a slow pan of a scene you can extract a number of stills and stitch them together to create a higher res panoramic still. Unless you had panned slowly and used a tripod the motion blur could well kill this idea though.

Certainly from my feeble efforts at pulling stills from video first thing is to go through the footage looking for the cleanest frame around where you want the photo from.

Moral from all this, always take a still camera. If you know you'll want to pull stills from your video and don't have / just can't carry anymore kit then upping the shutter speed a notch or two can help.

Bob.
Coursedesign wrote on 7/31/2007, 8:25 PM
I had been using Genuine Fractals in Photoshop for years, but recently I've had better results using Alien Skin's Blow Up.

That's why I said "currently." It's an ongoing battle.

You can download a trial and see for yourself (which of the latest versions) you get the best results with, because it can vary a bit with the subject also.
birdcat wrote on 8/1/2007, 4:58 AM
Are there any standalone packages that do this as well or better?

I have an older version of PhotoShop (version 7) and as a rule don't like using it (I prefer the user interfaces of Corel PhotoPaint or Paint Shop Pro).

Thanks.
bassam wrote on 8/30/2007, 1:01 PM
Thanks for all the suggestions and tips -

I found a freelancer on scriptlance.com that converted the low res. photos for me with Photozoom

...After getting the high res tiff photos back I gave them to the DVD cover designer and he further enhanced them with PS - the result - the DVD case looks great - all from low res. photos from the video footage.

thanks again for all the suggestions - wouldn't have been able to do it without you.