Comments

Terry Esslinger wrote on 8/11/2008, 11:04 AM
Have your footage on the time line. Place your curser on the frame that you want to grab. SET THE PREVIEW WINDOW TO BEST FULL.
Click on the grab still icon above the frame.
f-mac wrote on 8/11/2008, 12:37 PM
Thanks for the reply, Terry but I was more interested in the 'Properties' settings for the actual video capture. I recorded my footage in HDV and set the 'Project Properties' as follows:-
Template = 720-25p (1280x720,25.000fps); Field Order = None (progressive scan); Pixel Aspect Ratio = 1.000(square); Full-resolution rendering quality = Best; De-interlace method = none.

However, when I capture clips though,their properties show as follows:-
Attributes = 1440x1080
Field order = upper field first
and Pixel aspect order = 1.3333 (HDV1080).

I know I'm doing something stupid but I don't know what. Any ideas?
Chienworks wrote on 8/11/2008, 1:29 PM
Any particular reason you didn't set the project properties for 1080p? If you have it set to 720p then Vegas will resample the frame to a smaller size.

The original footage is squished horizontally which is why it's only 1440x1080. The pixels are wider than they are tall. Vegas takes this into account when it generates the display. Setting the project properties to 1920x1080p and the preview to best/full will result in a 1920x1080 image with square pixels. This will be very good. You could get excellent if you produced a 1440x1080 image instead, but most photo editing and page layout programs will show this as a squished image which will have to be stretched out to appear properly anyway, and this stretching will be exactly the same thing that Vegas does to produce the 1920x1080 version, so you might as well do it that way to begin with.
f-mac wrote on 8/12/2008, 6:38 AM
Hi Chienworks; thanks for your reply.

I only set the template to HDV 720-25p because this was the highest 'p' setting offered on the 'template' drop-down list (the 1440x1080 and 1920x1080 options appeared to just relate to the 'i' option so be interlaced not progressive). Having read your post, I did some experimenting and set the'Template' option to HD1080-50i (to get the desired width & height values) then set the 'field order' to 'None' and hooray, this gave me access to a custom template value of 1920x1080, and the larger jpeg value. Is this an OK way of achieving a 'non-interlaced' value?

One final question, what 'Pixel aspect ratio' value would you recommend?

Thanks again for you help.
Chienworks wrote on 8/12/2008, 6:42 AM
For still images i always recommend 1:1 (1.0000). There's seldom any good reason to use anything else.
f-mac wrote on 8/13/2008, 3:20 AM
1:1 it is then!

Thanks again.