Best way to capture a still image from a DV AVI?

[spankey]

Hi-

I know this is a tad bit off the topic but is in the DV range? I was on vacation this weekend and taped some great footage while up in the mountains of pa. Bear, bobcats and such. I captured the file to my HD using Pinnacle studio DV and then used power dvd to capture the still shots. But there is horizontal lines in the picture? Is there a way to remove the horizontal lines from the movie? Deinterlacing would do this correct? My camera is a Sony TRV-140 digital 8 if that helps. Capturing thru a firewire card.

Thanks for the suggestions?

Spankey

[bb]

An easy way using VirtualDub:
- open your AVI in VirtualDub (ignore type-1 warning, if it shows up)
- add Donald Graft's SmartDeinterlace filter
- locate the frame where you want to take the shot
- press Ctrl+2 to capture the output frame to the clipboard (Ctrl+1 captures the input frame)

You may need to play with the filter settings for best results. You may use AviSynth, too (best in combination with VirtualDubMod, because of the auto-positioning).

There's also at least one still image deinterlacer available, but I don't remember where I read about it. But I guess it's better to use a video deinterlacer than a still image deinterlacer.

bb

[Ollie W. Holmes]

There is another way with Premiere 6.5. Get the filename into one of their bins, and drop it into the monitor window. Use the slider to get to the frame of interest. Then export it to a single frame, either a jpg or bmp file. From what I can see, the full 1/30 sec frame is there, i.e., Adobe has combined 2 60 Hz ntsc fields, and performed the 4:1:1 conversion to 4:4:4 (you get it as rgb, of course). I can't tell you if this conversion is the "best" that can be done, since so few programs allow you to do a frame grab, and thus comparison is difficult. Premiere offers this feature because they must have anticipated people repairing individual video frames with photoshop, and dropping them back into the editing stream.

It wouldn't surprise me if Final Cut, Vegas, and the other high-end nle's could also do the same thing.

The otherwise good Windvd 5 does a very good frame synthesis job from a dvd. But who wants to author a dvd from an avi file and go through all the hassle? Same thing with the dvd recorders that can take the firewire dv output from a camera and convert it to an mpeg-2 file that sits on a hard drive (e.g., panasonic dmr-e100). You have to burn a dvd to get it back to your computer.

[cweb]

I use an avisynth script with Donald Graft's kerneldeint deinterlacer
together with fluxsmooth. The results are good. I'm now using
video=coloryuv(video,gain_v=-16,opt="coring",Autogain=true, Autowhite=false)
to fix the colour levels.

I open it in virtualdubmod and copy the frames I need to the clipboard,
into a graphics program which I use to save as TIFF.