Single Photos from a DV Camcorder tape.

Cardew

I have a Canon DV Camcorder(MVX200). I need to ‘take off’ some single frames off a recorded tape for reproducing as photographs and I would like to get them as good a quality as possible. I have never tried this before.

Apart from the Tape, I have downloaded it onto my PC as a Windows Media File(wmv), a mpeg file and with NeroVision as an avi file(13Gb for 60 mins!!!)

Using Power Producer I can advance the avi file frame by frame and copy them to a file. Each frame is saved as a BMP file.

However despite each photo being approx 1.5Mb the quality is awful! It is ‘pixelated’ and grainy and I have seen better 20kb photos. I can zoom in, or crop a section, on the photo without any deterioration of the(poor) quality.

Converting the BMP file to jpeg does not help.

Can any video expert please let me know if it is possible to get good quality photos from a DV tape(the movie itself is very good quality) and if it is possible, how!

Thanks.

samhale

I'm sure normally you go through the cameras menu to take the photos off the tape onto a memory card.
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Tutorials/HowToTakeSnapShot.aspx

AHAR

I believe the resolution of your DV video will be 720 x 576 pixels. That's only 0.4 megapixels. The first digital camera I bought in 2001 had 1.3 megapixels. I think you can see the problem you're going to have.

Cardew

samhale wrote: »

I'm sure normally you go through the cameras menu to take the photos off the tape onto a memory card.
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Tutorials/HowToTakeSnapShot.aspx

Thanks.

I explained I can take 'stills' off the tape - but the quality is poor and this quote from your link confirms that.

while the resulting pictures aren’t good enough for printing, they are fine for WebPages.

I am aware that whilst recording on the DV tape, you can take a photo and send it to the sd memory card at the same time(by pressing the photo button) . However I didn't!!

Cardew

AHAR wrote: »

I believe the resolution of your DV video will be 720 x 576 pixels. That's only 0.4 megapixels. The first digital camera I bought in 2001 had 1.3 megapixels. I think you can see the problem you're going to have.

However the images I save are 1.5Mb.

Even 0.4Mb photos can produce good quality prints if they are not 'blown up'.

AHAR

Be careful not no confuse megabytes with megapixels.
It sounds like your 1.5 megabyte captures are taken in BMP format. This is an uncompressed format. A JPEG on the otherhand which takes up 1.5 megabytes on your hard drive can be far more detailed than a 1.5 megabyte BMP because it has compressed the image inormation in a way that often doesn't noticably reduce quality but considerably reduces the space needed to store it. That's why smallish JPEGs can produce decent prints - there's more image information in them than their file size suggests

Imagine going scuba diving with a compressed air cylinder compared with the same volume of uncompressed air - you can take many more breaths from the compressed cylinder. (it's the best example I could think of!)
It's late but I hope all that is some help.