my minidv camera is supose to be pretty good at taking pictures. i dont use the memory card and was just wondering how to get my pictures onto my computer. also wondering how to get still frames from my video? i use premiere and just hit save frame as, but the quality is horrible, everyone else shows theirs and they look as good as their video. what am i doing wrong?

If you don't use the memory card, then you have to export a still frame as a picture, like you've been doing. However, I don't know what kind of "quality" you're referring to...perhaps you aren't deinterlacing it? That would get rid of any horizontal lines where there should be motion blur...is that what you're talking about?

What you need to do is deinterlace the image. Save the still using premiere, then open it up in Paintshop pro or Photoshop (other programs will probably do this also). Here you can apply de-interlace which will remove all those lines and get you a sharp good looking still.

-Chris

idea stealer.

Delinterlacing is a pain. Why does this have to be done on every still frame of movement that you want to export? I admit that I do interlace, but why couldn't NLE systems do this upon every export automatically? You will have to interlace for a crisper image anyways, right?

Deinterlacing simply means combining the upper and lower fields of 60i video. Any professional filmmaker should only be working with deinterlaced video anyways. Interlaced video isn't neccessarily crisper; it's just more amateur. But let's try to avoid a heated discussion here. Wikipedia "interlacing" for a good explanation.

Yeah, interlacing seems crisper only because de-interlaced video is interpolated to make up for the missing fields. It's half the resolution, upsampled to scale.

Jeasus Christ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's actually spelled Jesus... just so ya know. Welcome... interesting first post. I'm too lazy to look up Bill Nye's town. Someone let me know where it is

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jeazus

thanks for your help, i had no idea i was supose to deinterlace the pics. but one more thing, in photoshop 7.0, where do i go to deinterlace the picture?

Effects menu --> Video --> deinterlace. Interpolate works best.

does it need to be even or odd fields? and do i need to save the frame as something certain in premiere, cause i tried a jpg and the pic doesnt look any better, barely any change and in a bad way.

bmp is better. Even/odd, doesn't matter.

Do you want to post a picture of it so we can see exactly how bad it looks? It might be something else we haven't thought of.

pic from pinnacle studios video


pic after deinterlacing

That doesn't look like a deinterlacing problem. What issue do you have with the image? Looks like a regular video frame grab to me. Analog video or something shot in low light, yes, but a video frame grab nonetheless.

.bmp files are huge for no reason.

i know on Final Cut you can export .png and .pict files and de-interlace them as you export them (i think for .png you can even tell it what frame rate you are using for better results). that way they're ready to go without the extra step in photoshop.

i don't remember if exported .tiff files can do the same.

you shoud just save everything as .tiff, better than .bmp for moving around in various programs, and you keep all the quality, plus you can save layers and transparency in Photoshop with them, which when imported to programs like FCP, let's you simply overlay them, or import various layers and switch them as you need them.

Yeah... that looks fine. It's grainy, and you can see the non-square pixels, but that is the case with most video grabs. I'm afraid that's about as good as it gets. If you scale it down for the web it looks a lot better.