A way of getting lots of hi-res images

G

Gludy

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Joined
19 Aug 2001
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Location
Brecon, Wales
www.sailingvideos4us.com
Many of you will have lots of video footage and would love to take stills from that footage but know that they would be low resolution blary images.
There is now a piece of software that samples the images either side of the one you want and form a single high resolution image from an otherwise blary video frame - the software is simply superb.
Here is an example from a standard digital video camera:-
75d921ec84434b41a2ac1ca05052b0f3.jpg


The software costs a bit over £20 and is so good that I thought I should share it with you - I have no commercial interest.

It means that you can just choose what shots you want from your video footage and end uop with multi megapizel high quality stills. You can download a trial to prove it.

The software is called Moments from HERE

I could not help share this bit of info as I now have millions of good still images I never knew I had!
 
Good evening Gludy.
I'm very upset with your suggestion! Having looked at the website I suspect I'll be spending more time at the computer than on the boat!!

Seriously, it looks to be a first class product and I'll be trying it within the next few days.

Thanks again for the heads up.
 
An easy fix for low-res video stills

Gludy -

Yes, I think this is a cheap and cheerful easy tool for anyone without access to Photoshop, but I'm afraid it won't create "multi megapizel high quality stills" from video frames. Here's why.

For PAL, video 'stills' are 720 x 576 pixels and are 'interlaced' - i.e. each field only contains half the data - thus PAL records 50 fields a second, or 25 'frames'. It can be described as 720i.

What this product's screen blurb compares is an interlaced field captured from Adobe Premiere with their 'enhanced' image - this isn't a fair comparison. No one would use an unenhanced bitmap frame capture.

Now, you could take two or three adjacent fields and superimpose them, but as all would be either 'odd' or 'even' you wouldn't gain much - in the end you still need to 'deinterlace' either by interpolation or duplication. And you don't create any extra pixels - your end image is still 720 x 576.

Now apply some standard photoshop filters - sharpen, find edges (maybe), adjust colour / hue / saturation perhaps, and you'll have the best quality image you can get from the original field.

Any enlargement of this image needs a computer programme to 'guess' the attributes of intervening pixels - if you pull a black pixel and a white pixel apart it will insert a grey pixel in the gap. This is just a form of anti-aliasing on a big scale.

You simply can't create a hi-res image from a low-res one, despite what 'Spooks' and Holywood would have us believe.

Now, having said that, there is a useful feature in the 'studio edition'. Although the programme doesn't do anything more than can be done in about a minute a frame manually using Photoshop, the $199 version has a useful batch processing facility and can save hours of time if you're doing thousands of stills.

With apologies for 'stretching' the thread, below are three pics. First is an interlaced field, second is de-interlaced and third is enhanced - essentially what this software does. As I say, useful for anyone without Photoshop who just wants the odd frame from their home videos.




fox1ug6.jpg

fox2cp1.jpg

fox3ze2.jpg
 
Re: An easy fix for low-res video stills

Ok, what is claimed is this
[ QUOTE ]

Want high-quality still images of your video? Topaz Moment can make it happen. Topaz Moment is a Windows application that can capture and enhance mega-pixel still images from any video source by utilizing our super-resolution technology to combine information from many different frames of video. The result is a true high resolution screen grab – even from a non-HD source. These output images are cleaner, sharper and in higher resolution than any other product on the market.


[/ QUOTE ]

I have all the sotware filters you mention but cannot get the quality anything like that ptroduced by this software. The still grab of the frame of the dolphin is just nowhere near that produced by this software. Whilst it does produce a megapixel image- that is a simple fact, I accept that those extra pixels must be interpolated etc,

I use top end still cameras and I am used to priocessing stills using the filters you mention but could never get anything like the quality produced by this software.

I am happy to prove this by posting an orginal - have you work on it and then both of us post the result. That would be interesting!

In any event, of course, as you say, the ease of use of this software makes it a very handy tool for the more mortal of us anyway /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Re: An easy fix for low-res video stills

[ QUOTE ]

For PAL, video 'stills' are 720 x 576 pixels and are 'interlaced' - i.e. each field only contains half the data - thus PAL records 50 fields a second, or 25 'frames'. It can be described as 720i.


[/ QUOTE ]

Don't you mean 576i ?
If it was 720i then that would be HD wouldn't it?

In principle you are right in what you are saying, the expression commonly used is 'rubbish in - rubbish out'. You can't make a silk purse out of a PAL image or something like that.
 
Re: An easy fix for low-res video stills

Indeedy. 576i.

Yep, you can play tricks but every filter you use actually loses some of the original info - I don't doubt Gludy's word that the results appear much better than the origs, but not a patch on real HD. Or even on 576p /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
 
oops... I think you have given them too much publicity - The download portion of their site now comes back with a "500 infernal server error"!

Steve
 
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