DVD frame grabs

[David Mullen ASC]

I usually grab frames from DVD on my PC using Nero player software, which saves the files as a bitmap. I open these up in Paintshop Pro and crop out the letterboxing and stretch the anamorphic image to look correct, then save as a JPEG.

 

But when I'm using my Mac laptop, I have to use the VLC player software to do screen grabs, and these are stored as a JPEG. And these are already stretched into the correct aspect ratio.

 

I don't really like the way the screen grabs on my Mac look, they seem to have worse compression artifacts.

 

Here is a blow-up of a similar frame, first done on Nero using my PC:

 

This is using VLC on my Mac:

 

So my question is, is there a better way of grabbing DVD frames on my Mac?

[Michael Nash]

I use the "Capture Widget" from here: http://www.vanillasoap.com/widgets/

 

It's free, and it goes straight into Dashboard. You can open the DVD player window to any size you like (like full screen) and manually capture any size/shape selection you want. It works great.

 

Captured from DVD Player "Normal size", reduced to 70% (to fit on page):

 

Captured from DVD Player "Maximum size," blown up 200% in Preview:

[Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC]

I've always used DVD Capture: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16324

 

[Satsuki Murashige]

 

Here's a frame from "A History of Violence" I grabbed using Michael's method, the capture widget. I saved it as a 4mb tiff and down-rezzed it in photoshop to get under the forum's 100k limit, which is why the compression is so visible. The tiff looks fine to me. The capture widget can save the file as a jpeg, gif, tiff, psd, pdf and a bunch of other formats. I find it kind of a pain to use compared to the Nero frame grab function because you have to toggle between Dashboard and DVD Player each time you find the frame you want to grab, and the "capture window" tool also captures this:

 

You can also specify the area you want to capture using "capture selection", but then you have to physically drag a selection around the frame which is annoying when you need to grab a lot of frames. On the other hand, you don't need to unsqueeze the image. Chayse's frame looks pretty darn good though, I'd like to tryout his method.