Newbie Photo Capture

Fireguy5150 wrote on 1/31/2009, 3:22 PM

I am pretty new at the video editing , especially with Vegas Pro . I have used Cyber Link and there was a feature that allowed me to capture a photo out of the video footage when it was paused . I have looked all through the manual and the show me how tutorials as well as searched the forums .I can not for the life of me find out how to do this with the Vegas Pro software . There must be a way to do this and it is probably staring me right in the face . Do I somehow use the crop and pan feature .
Thanks in advance for any help .

Comments

bStro wrote on 1/31/2009, 4:03 PM

There are a couple icons on the Preview window that do what you want. The one that looks like a floppy disk saves the current frame to a file. The one that looks two overlapping documents copies the current frame to the clipboard from whence you can then paste into a graphics app.

Note that the image will be saved as it looks in the preview window. So if you want a fullsize and good quality "capture," set the Preview quality to Best / Full first.

Rob

Tim L wrote on 1/31/2009, 4:10 PM

[Edit] DANG... I type too slowly....

Look above you preview window. The last icon on the right looks like a 3.5" floppy disc. That icon will save whatever is in the preview window as a still frame, either JPG or PNG. After you click the icon, a pop-up window will prompt you for filename and type. PNG is a lossless compression, so it would generally be preferred.

The trick here is that the saved image is dependent on your preview settings. If you have the preview window set for "Draft" or "Preview", you'll get a smaller size photo, since those methods only use half the scanlines of the actual video. So before you save your snapshot, you should set the preview window to Best/Full. Don't worry -- if you preview window isn't sized big enough to see the entire frame, you will still get the full frame image in the saved snapshot.

Also, if you have interlaced video with motion in the frame you want to save, you can sometimes get better results by momentarily setting your project properties to "Progressive", which will cause Vegas to de-interlace the frame an (generally) reduce the interlace artifacts. Try de-interlace options "Blend fields" and "Interpolate Fields" to see which looks better. The leftmost icon above the preview window will let you change the project properties. Just make sure you don't forget to set the project properties back to the correct values after you save the snapshot.

Tim L

Fireguy5150 wrote on 2/1/2009, 10:04 PM

Thanks BStro and Tim L for the help , I knew it was going to be starring right at me .