DVD Question..

[Lee]

Do DVDs have different 'quality' settings when they are being written?

I have a couple of DVDs out of the last batch i got that no matter how hard i try i cant get a decent quality screengrab from and its really starting to annoy the piss out of me.

Im wondering if it is perhaps an issue with the DVD quality itself and not the screengrabs im actually taking.

Regards,

Lee

[Paco]

Lee:
- are you batching your screen caps (SC)?
- what is the quality issue (too blurry, pixel'ated/squares, interlacing, general anomalies et cetera)?

I do not believe in, or like doing, SC via batch, and do all manually:
- watch @ double speed
- pause
- scroll time frame-by-frame
- depress 'C' (capture)
- repeat

IF they require any correcting, I go slap our vid-gimp, followed by me creating a batch process or Action in PS, to clean-up (colour, contrast, crop etc) the images.

[Titanmen]

Absolutely, DVDs have different quality rates when being written and output. It's called bit rate and often people output their films at a lower bitrate to fit all the content on a cheaper DVD-5 which can be burned. The lower the bitrate the lower the quality of the DVD, and thus the lower the quality of your screen cap.

The best way to judge this is to look at the black levels in a DVD. If the black looks grey or blueish then the bitrate has been turned down to squeeze the content into a smaller file size.

Getting a good quality screen cap off a DVD-5 that contains more then 75-90 mins. of content is going to be hard. The base file is just not good enough quality to get a good full size screen cap.

[Paco]

Excellent Titanmen - the explanation of the colours is appreciated.
Thanks!