Pulling Stills From Tape

[SteveHardeman]

I currently pull stills from my tape using Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

I shoot with an old Sony Handycam.

The stills I pull are not good.

Are there other programs out there that would allow me to pull higher quality stills from my tape?

[Ledrak]

I use Vegas too, and i can pull stills from my videos that look great. Your problem must be the video quality you're working with.

[mynameisjim]

Captures are never going to be as good as real photos no matter what you do, but they can be pretty good.

In Vegas make sure your preview window is set to "Best" and "Full" before copying the picture to the clipboard and pasting it into photoshop or whatever.

Like Ledrak said, your source file has a lot to do with how your capture will look.

[Hunter_ST_69]

QuickTime pro ($29.95) has a very nice "export movie to image sequence" function that can spit out an entire movie to PNG, JPG, etc based on whatever interval you want (x frames/sec).

[balls_deep]

ulead video studio works well for stills as well

[Lana]

ulead video studio works well for stills as well

Sorry BD but I have to disagree. The first 30 or so still sets on my site we're just that (Ulead Video Studio) and they look like crap. We now use Final Cut and the grabs are passable but nothing will compare to a dedicated SLR. Video tape and take stills, it's the only way to go to look somewhat professional.
You don't even need an SLR. We have a bunch of stills on the site that were done with a Canon point and shoot. Make it fun - shoot some video and snap some pics.

[Lana]

Here's the difference:

Sreen grab from a video editor and Cheapie point and shoot pics and SLR

[balls_deep]

Originally posted by Lana
Here's the difference:

Sreen grab from a video editor and Cheapie point and shoot pics

negotiable at best, i still see fuzzies.

i've been using vegas for my still but i only require a 250x150

[Lana]

negotiable at best, i still see fuzzies.

You need glasses. You can't tell a quality difference in those three pics? Yeah, if you're only going 250x150 sure but that's not what Luvins talking about.

[Ledrak]

I don't know why anyone would want to use video captures as full photography style photos for a website. The only thing I use video captures for are to make thumbnails and small pics for when I do vidcap galleries.

If you want photography style photos then you're better off using a real camera to snap pics.

[Ledrak]

As a general rule, you can't do good photography with a video camera... just as you can't do good video with a photo camera.

[porn punk]

It's all about pixel ratio.

Some video cameras these days will produce both. Like most people here are saying, a still camera will always have more still image quality than a still captured from a video camera.

I would say, well how much quality do you need? But of course for a still image, as opposed to a moving image, it's as much quality as you can get (as long as you can afford the bandwidth).

[porn punk]

PS. no program invented yet (except hands on touch up work that takes hours, days and months) will compensate for poor recording quality even if the qaulity was good at the time it was recorded.