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I went to go see Harry Potter 4 in IMAX the other day, and I was wondering to myself: How do they get those high-quality pictures from the movies you see all over the Internet? My question is: Is there a program where I can choose a frame in a movie, click a button, and have it process a high-resolution screenshot of that particular frame in the movie? I mean, DVDs are high-quality digital discs, so there should be no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do this, regardless of your video card. Any ideas? I’m open to freeware or software you have to pay for. Thanks!
My method is this:
1. Download trailer in HD from Apple (if available)
2. Use Quicktime 7 Pro to export video as a non-apple file type
3. Open in PowerDVD and use it’s screenshot function to take a screen, this step can be replaced with turning off all hardware acceleration and using normal print screen button, if it isn’t turned off, hardware prevents screens.You can skip the Apple steps, if you have another video source like a DVD, but Apple is the best place to get HD trailers, and all programs mentioned to cost money. It’s the only way I know, except disabling hardware acceleration and using a free media player to take a screen, that way could be free.
Also, I just remembered this, Quicktime doesn’t have the print screen disabler on hardware, if you make a clip fullscreen, and hit print screen you can get something like:
Screen taken from Aeon Flux HD trailer from Apple, it wasn’t paused at a perfectly still frame, hence some blur.
I didn’t hit fullscreen, I hit size=100%, becuase then it filled the whole screen (on a 1080p HD clip, since its height is 1024, just fitting on my screen :))Hm, let me clarify: I have a DVD Video, purchased from a store, and I want miscellaneous screenshots in HD from the movie. How would I go about doing this? (No trailers or anything) because when I play a DVD on my computer, the quality isn’t good enough for a screenshot to be taken.
Oh, then you’re out of luck, I think. DVDs only come in so high of a resolution, and to get it on a HDTV with higher resolutions, it noramlly requires a DVD player that upconverts the signal to high resolutions, you can only get some much out of what’s on there. I think so, there might be a way, but nothing I know about.
The version of PowerDVD that I use on my computer has a built in feature to take screen captures of any still image in the movie and produces the image at 720 x 480. I’ve looked into this a while ago, and downloaded programs which claimed to take screen captures, but failed. The only luck I found was the built in feature I had — perhaps (and most likely) any newer version of PowerDVD will be of some use to you.
Spike, there are no HD-DVDs yet. The format for HD DVDs is still being debated (see http://www.hddvd.org/hddvd/ for more). When you play a DVD on your PC, you should get the maximum resolution possible (since PC displays are higher resolution than standard TVs and even most HDTVs). Television signals are measured not by resolution, but by the number of horizontal lines. Here’s a good resource that shows the horizontal resolution for various formats: http://hometheater.about.com/cs/television/a/aavideoresa_2.htm
Commercial DVDs weigh in at up to 540 lines. This translates to 540 pixels (vertically) by whatever the width of the image is… but easily within the range of any modern PC.
As others noted, PowerDVD can do this, and there are probably a few other options. Standard screen shots usually won’t work because most DVD software players use DirectX.
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