Pinnacle Studio Stills much sharper than Vegas stills

Comments

farss wrote on 5/10/2005, 1:48 AM
Hows about a Z1? The downscaled HDV can looks pretty good and you can pull a fine still out of the HDV video. Still if those 'film' school students you're using don't know who to shoot sprockets right, you could be in trouble with HDV :)
Bob.
Laurence wrote on 5/11/2005, 7:13 PM
I use Photozoom pro quite a bit for uprezzing and deinterlacing frame captures. I have a script which captures at the best preview resolution with no deinterlace. I load the frame into Photoshop, resize it so that it is the same width but half as high to get rid of one field. Then I use the export function in Photoshop to export the half height frame into Photozoom. I expand the frame back to full height using the Photozoom spline algorythm. If you want a bigger picture, resize in Photozoom to whatever size you want with twice as much vertical as horizontal zoom. I've done stills this way that look great at sizes that are appropriate for DVD cover art.

I sometimes use Topaz Moment version 2 as well. What Topaz Moment can do that Vegas can't is motion blur calculated from a chosen number of frames. Let's say you want to capture a still of someone dancing. Doing this from Vegas will give you a sixtieth of a second frozen in time. With Topaz Moment, you can capture a blur of motion that resembles a slow shutter speed. This can be quite useful sometimes for artistic effect. Usually I just use the Vegas capture though.
Jøran Toresen wrote on 5/11/2005, 7:24 PM
Hello
I always use Topaz Moment when I capture frames from a video. Take a look at these pictures, and you’ll see why:

http://www.aaproductions.net/mep/joran.pdf

Joran
dreamlx wrote on 5/11/2005, 9:47 PM
Do you now perhaps if topaz moment does also support HDV m2t files or high resolution mpeg2 files ?
Laurence wrote on 5/11/2005, 9:55 PM
I tried Topaz Moment version 1 with some raw Sony HDV footage I downloaded. It worked fine.
Laurence wrote on 5/12/2005, 8:43 AM
Three more programs that can capture stills from a media file:

Cyberlink PowerDVD
Nero Media Player
Irfanview