s s wrote in message <35071410.2D124C91@Interaccess.com>...
>any help would be appreciated...I've been using the
>snappy for a little over a month now...and considering the
>price, I'm pretty happy with it...the problem I am having is
>getting a decent quality picture at anything greater than
>320 x 240....I am shooting for the most part with a
>Canon Hi-8 and have even used a Sony TRV-7 digital...
>but I cannot get a very good "larger picture"...I shot
>TV news for 5 years so I'm pretty good at shooting
>some decent video tape and it looks good on the TV...but
>if I go to 640 x 480...well the quality just isn't acceptable...
>any tips on settings or ideas would be welcomed...also if
>there is a product that works better than snappy (python
>dazzle etc) for grabbing stills...please advise

If you have played with the various settings (the ones that
control the size of the original capture and the number of
fields used to make the final image) and combinations of
these settings to optimize them for your purposes and with
your source material characteristics (and have tried capturing
at double the resolution you want to finish with, resizing
through a pixel-interpolation tool, such as the one in
Micrografx Picture Publisher [which also has excellent
sharpening and photo-characteristic adjustment tools...]),
you have probably exhausted the possibilities for capturing
video stills from your sources using the excellent Snappy
device. I found that for Hi-8 and much single-chip DV
capture, about 320x240 pixels was about the largest size that
looked good. The best frames from good one-chip DV camcorders
and frames from the 3-chip Sony VX-1000 can look good larger.
(Examples of DV Snappy frame grabs are on my web page [first
photo, of me, and the photos under "Changing Showz - may
appear here", then "Bob's Baseball Game"].) As with film,
where a single frame blown up to normal screen size would
look terrible, the varying information contained in many
video frames combined in rapid succession can make a
satisfying larger image (Snappy makes use of this when it
combines up to 8 fields, though this is only useful when
there are not gross differences between the fields).
With the DV camcorders, a stable frame can be held on
"pause", which is what I use for captures (and one can
easily select the particular frame to be copied).
--
David Ruether
http://www.fcinet.com/ruether
ruether@fcinet.com