What The?????

[Bill Hardy]

Barry, how are you capturing your stills? I capture to .jpg from iMovie but like Odessedream says my photos DO look pixilated. I then realized my jpg's have only 116 KB when a shot from a PD150 I downloaded was found to be 336 KB, over three times as much. No wonder my pics are pixelated! So I will have to do my whole web page over as I have been actually giving a poor representation of the GL2's quality.

But that's not all. I notice your video stills look nothing like mine and so I made a 1,016 .bmp still from your closeup of Liz, then converted that to a 40 KB jpg of Liz. I could not believe my eyes. The 40 KB shot of liz was not only as good as the 1016 KB bmp of Liz, but both pics looked equally fantastic with no pixelization. How can a 40 KB pic look as good as a 1 MB pic? Although I am confused I am eager to find out your method of extracting pics from your movies so I can get to work and clear the air as reguards to my CRAPPY web page pics. I may just go ahead with the iMovie to Quicktime movie to .bmp to .jpg method, as I see my pics are looking much better now from my GL2 that way. And I can't believe they only take up 40 KB! But any further advice would be appreciated.

Respectfully,
Bill

[Barry Goyette]

Bill

I'm exporting my stills out of Final Cut Pro. I just tried to export out of iMovie, and like most FCP users, I find the program mystifying. I was able to do it, and got a 117k file as well. With final cut pro, you are able to control the quality of the jpeg (or output as a tiff or other format), whereas imovie seems to do it all automatically at a 10:1 compression ratio...decent but not the best. But I don't know if this is the source of your problem or not.

Now the discrepancy between the PD150 and gl2 jpeg size has more to do with image content(if they are both being exported out of iMovie). Jpegs can vary in size depending what's in the file....the larger PD150 file would indicate more texture in the image...or possibly even more noise. If the image were the same on both cameras, the file size should be about the same.

If you don't have FCP, you can do it in the quicktime player. Export selecting "movie to picture" then USE> photo-jpeg or uncompressed. (if you use photo jpeg, under options select best.)....This is similar to how it works in FCP as well.

You know, it does look like iMovie is doing something screwy to your stills...I just downloaded one, and the pixel dimensions are off from a normal dv frame (900k should be 1013 k)...and there is a lot of aliasing that doesn't appear natural for the camera...almost looks like interlacing field slippage (in fact, when I first saw your stills, I think I just assumed they were in interlaced, without reading the captions)...OR what a QT movie looks like when high quality view is turned off. I'm thinking that the iMovie still function is really designed for using within iMovie, and not as a still export. Just a thought.

Hope this is of some help.


Barry

[Jason Bagby]

when i first got my first mac, i started grabbing frames (for pleasure, not business) and saving them in .pict form, until i realized i'd be mailing the files to many people who haven't seen the light yet, and couldn't open .pict files, so i started grabbing both jpg and pict files. now, when i am browsing thru my pictures i can tell the difference betwixt the quality of the two- just by comparing thumbnails!
the jpgs look very interlaced, and very pixelated. the difference is magnified when i throw them up on my desktop.
if you have to work in jpg and have a copy of photoshop, maybe try saving as .pict files and tweaking them to make nice jpgs in photoshop.
barry might tell you if that is a good idea or not, cuz he knows a lot!