Capturing Frames - Frameshots Help

**nicedreams** · 01-24-2007, 12:45 PM

Can anyone tell me how to fix this image? I captured it using frameshots. And you can see its all blurry or pixelated. How can I fix that? Are my settings wrong?

Jimmy

**Lee** · 01-24-2007, 12:48 PM

Looks like it is something to do with the scanlines on the original movie rather than frameshots, i dont recall ever having seen an option to reduce scanlines on Frameshots, give me a few and ill have a play with the settings and see what i can find though

Regards,

Lee

Xstr8guy · 01-24-2007, 10:43 PM

It's called interlacing. The scanlines on video encoded for standard analog TVs only show a complete frame by first showing the odd lines of resolution and then going back to the top and showing the even lines. In 2 passes, a complete frame is shown.

Here's a wikipedia link that explains it better... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlace

I don't use Photoshop but I imagine it has a deinterlacing filter like PaintShop Pro does. Just batch your images and run them through the deinterlacing filter.

Xstr8guy · 01-24-2007, 10:49 PM

Btw, if you are editing a batch of screencaps with an assortment of different filters/effects, be sure to have deinterlacing as the first filter in the chain. Otherwise the image will not deinterlace as well. For example, this is the order I typically run screencaps through my graphics editor to raise the quality of the image... deinterlace, contrast+, sharpen, resize and then crop out black bars if necessary.

**Lee** · 01-24-2007, 11:19 PM

Sorry got sidetracked and forgot i was supposed to reply here LOL

I checked through FrameShots and couldnt see anything that did anything to the scanlines/interlacing so i would suggest trying the same thing Jim mentioned, do the grabs then run them through a graphics program to see if you can tidy them up a little.

Regards,

Lee

**nicedreams** · 01-25-2007, 11:32 AM

Thanks for the replies. I still can't get it to look good. I tried the de-interlace option in both photoshop cs2 and psp 8 and it comes out even stranger looking.

Ugh.

Jimmy

Xstr8guy · 01-25-2007, 12:56 PM

Was the image resized before you deinterlaced? Even if you didn't resize it manually, Frameshots may be resizing it for you. Make sure the box is checked in Frameshots to keep the image 'same size as video'.

**nicedreams** · 01-25-2007, 01:29 PM

Yeah, i have the same size as video checked.

Does this happen to anyone else? I tried multiple video sources, and all the images tend to have the lines in it like my first one here.

Can it be my computer or is all software controlled?

Jimmy

Xstr8guy · 01-26-2007, 01:51 AM

You will have problems like this if you are using a cam that records in an interlaced format. Some cams record progressive scan which should give you screencaps without the scanlines.

What I do to get a good selection of usable images is to use batch mode in frameshots and take tons of captures. I'll them batch deinterlace all of them and then go through the folder in Explorer and trash the bad pics. You should end of with plenty of good pictures.

Another thing you can do is to take screen captures with your graphics editor. I do this by manually stepping through the video in frameshots and activate screen capture in your graphics editor and take a snap of the desired frame. If you do it this way, it seems to capture both frames of an interlaced image so you won't have any visible scanlines. I use this method when I want to catch a specific clean image for a tour or to catch the spurt of a cumshot. You would think there would be an easier and simpler way but I haven't found one yet.

Another little tip for you... reducing the size of an image that is interlaced lessens the visibility of the scanlines.

Xstr8guy · 01-26-2007, 01:58 AM

Oh, one more thing... Paintshop Pro lets you choose if you want to deinterlace odd or even scanlines. Selecting one or the other will have some effect on the deinterlaced image. Changing that one parameter can make the difference between a good image or a bad image. I imagine Photoshop has a similar feature.

If you would like to email an image for me to try to fix, send a completely unprocessed image (raw .jpg straight for frameshots) to xstr8guy AT sbcglobal.net.

Xstr8guy · 01-26-2007, 02:01 AM

Lol, sorry... one last thing. I tried deinterlacing your first sample image and it didn't work for me either. But It looks like you added your logo to the image before you tried to deinterlaced it. Don't do a single thing to your image before you try deinterlacing first and see if that helps.

**nicedreams** · 01-26-2007, 03:38 PM

Thanks for your help. I couldn't get frameshots to get any image to look good, so I decided to try out CaptureX. That worked much better for me. The images still had the interlace lines, but they cleared up nicely in photoshop.

Jimmy