The quality of a still you capture from the Vegas preview window is determined by the preview window quality. Make certain it's at Best - Full first. Once you've captured the still you need to open it in say PS and apply the de-interlace filter.

The quality of a still from video from a moving vehicle will be most affected by the amount of motion blur due to the slow shutter speeds of video cameras. Preferably get the camera's shutter speed as fast as possible.

Bob.

I do use full at best setting. Setting the preferences to progressive scan helped some. The Photoshop de-interlace filter didn't seem to do much good though.

If you haven't seen a still taken from Pinnacle I don't think you can appreciate what it does. It does much more than just remove the interlacing. As I said, a freeze framel made from a video clip taken from a moving car can produce a readable sign when it would be just a blur in any NLE I have used. It is worth having for this feature alone (but not for anything else.) Am I the only one that has noticed this?

I'd love to know how they're doing it. Just the motion blur created in the camera is usually enough to make a still from a video under those conditions look pretty blury anyway. I wonder if they're actually doing a whole lot more clever tricks.
If you could it'd be interesting if you could post the same still done in Vegas and Pinnacle for some of the gurus here to cast their eyes over.
Bob.

Would love to see a couple of the frames in the raw original AVI file.. along with the still from Pinnacle and the stills you get from Vegas. Maybe the VegasUsers.com site would be a good place to Upload?

Try setting the Deinterlace Method in the Vegas Project Properties to "Interpolate Fields".

Marco

You could try the free avi2bmp program - see if it produces any better results for you.

dsf,

What version of Pinnacle Studio are you using?

Thanks

Setting properties to "interpolate fields" did it. At best-full, progressive scan AND interpolate fields I now no longer see any difference in the clarity of stills from Vegas and Pinnacle when placed side by side. You must have all these settings to get the clear picture, i.e. lower/upper field first and interpolate fields doesnt do it. Or just progressive scan and any other setting for de-interlace.

I guess Pinnacle simply employs all these techniques automatically when making a still frame.

The version I was keeping installed was 7.0 but now I can make some more room on my HD.

I guess the thing to do now is to set Vegas as noted above and then change it back to the default settings before rendering. OTOH, If the project will end up on a DVD, is there any harm in leaving the project settings at Progressive Scan and the de-interlace at Interpolate Fields for the render too?

Anyway, thanks for the help. Not having to import from Pinnacle makes life a little easier.

Actually, it's MUCH easier than that. A script can do all of these steps for you. For example, when Neon saves snapshots, it does the following:

Vegas.Project.Preview.RenderQuality = VideoRenderQuality.Best;
Vegas.Project.Preview.FullSize = true;
Vegas.Project.Video.FieldOrder = VideoFieldOrder.ProgressiveScan;
Vegas.Project.Video.DeinterlaceMethod = VideoDeinterlaceMethod.InterpolateFields;

Which sets the preview size to Best (Full), changes to Progressive Scan, and changes the deinterlace method to Interpolate Fields. After the snapshot is generated, it will then reset the values back to what they previously were.

There are many scripts that generate snapshots (including the full code listed in one of my newsletters) so you can easily assign this entire process to a single button on the Vegas toolbar.

>> If the project will end up on a DVD, is there any harm in leaving the project settings at Progressive Scan and the de-interlace at Interpolate Fields for the render too?

If you render to interlaced video this should not affect your final render.
But if you render to progressiv video there are some differences between having set the Deinterlace Method of Project Properties to Blend or to Interpolate. Using Blend you will have smoother motion. Using Interpolate appear bit sharper but motions isn't that smooth and some edges might appear jaggy.
So in most cases using Blend is the better choice (except the case we discussed before - when exporting freeze frames).

Marco

> I guess the thing to do now is to set Vegas as noted above and then change it back to the default settings before rendering.

Actually, this is what the Snapshot to Timeline feature in Ultimate S does. I use to use Pinnacle Studio when I first started and I missed this feature so I wrote a script for it and eventually added it to Ultimate S. It takes the snapshot and adds it back to the timeline just like Pinnacle does.

~jr

Is it better to use PNG than JPG files, qualitily speaking?
Vegas seems to "push" this format over the other, no?
PNG=alpha channel but also "uncompressed", right?

PNG also saves alpha channel, yes. But it is not uncompressed but a lossless compression, whereas JPEGs exported from Vegas are lossy compressed, 95 percent quality.

Marco

I am always amazed at the wealth of info available on this forum. I was just about to post concerning this very problem. Actually, because the footage I with which I'm working this morning was digitized from analog, I assumed that, somehow, I was losing something because, although the frames in question were shot using a shutter speed of 1/10000 second, freezing a shot of a boy catching a softball was yeilding two shadowy images of the ball.

The only reason I stumbled across the Pinnacle connection is because I have to use that ap to interface with the analog converter (it's a Dazzle Video Creator 90).

I was about to take the DVC back to the store because all my pics in Vegas seemed to be blurry. By chance, I tried a still capture in the Pinnacle ap (Studio 9 Quick Start - a stripped down version of S9, I guess), and the capture was crisp and clear.

Obviously, I'm delighted to find the solution here on this forum.

I forgot to take note of Vegas' default settings before making the changes suggested here. When I closed Vegas and reopened it, the deinterlace method defaulted to none. Is this good, bad, what? Should I change it to default to blend (most of my work is with video, not grabbing stills).

Also, under what conditions would one change the field order from its default (lower field first) to upper field first?

Just curious.

Thanks again for this helpful thread.

Caruso

Well to start with any still from interlaced video that has motion is going to have interlace artifacts, that's the very nature of video!
Once I've captured a still I open it in Photoshop where I can choose which field I want to use and PS will interpolate to fill in the missing data. I don't know quite what Pinnacle are doing, probably just ditching one field and interpolating. Of course if there's no motion in the frame then you can use both fields and get better resolution. Seems to me the Vegas approach is better in that in some circumstances you can get a igher resolution result.

The de-interlace method has no effect unless you are de-interlacing.

Almost all video is lower field first, the only time you would change this is when dealing with interlaced video from some compositing programs.

Bob.

Always use a script to do snapshots from Vegas. As jetdv showed, there are four settings that must be correct for you to get the optimum resolution from your video.

While it is wonderful that Vegas can capture at multiple resolutions, Sony should definitely fix this long-standing rough spot and include a capture button that captures the frame at full resolution. I mean, how many times in your editing career did you REALLY want a 320x240 capture instead of that ugly high-resolution 720x480 grab with all those messy details and that useless sharpness and quality?

Given a choice, would you prefer making the de-interlace adjustment in P7 or making the setting changes in Vegas as discussed here.

I tried it both ways this morning. Didn't actually print any of the snapshots, but, on my computer screen, I could not tell the difference.

Caruso

It's called a Frame Grab Tool in Pinnacle. I've used it quite a bit for building a menu background. Works well. Simple tool...I'm surprised that a similar tool is not available in Vegas...without having to build it via a script. In other words, I would have thought something like this would have been ready to use in Vegas.

I use Topaz Moment when I capture video frames. Topaz is using multiple neighbouring frames and Topaz can enhance the captured picture to make it cleaner, sharper with a higher resolution. In my opinion this is an excellent program.

Joran

Topaz Moment was just updated recently to version 2.1. The update is free to version 1 owners and is noticably better.

Given a choice, would you prefer making the de-interlace adjustment in P7 or making the setting changes in Vegas as discussed here.

That's a good question, and exactly my workflow -- interlaced Best(Full) still from Vegas to PShop for the De-Interlace (Interpolate) filter -- while I'm there, I crop off the underscan bars, too :)

Even with all the "right" settings the stills aren't going to look good, especially when viewed on a large screen television set. Try using one as a backdrop for a menu in a DVDA project. It will look positively awful.
The cheapest digital still camera will do a better job any day of the week. And that goes for Pinnacle or any other NLE.

John