Hi Guys,

I've recently been asked to do some heavy duty capping for an online retailer of rare dvds and was using PowerDVD's built-in capture tool to get the caps; However, on some films it seems to not want to keep the aspect ratio or will jump off the frame it's currently paused on. Is there a better alternative to this?

I've been told that WinDVD has a nice built-in capture tool but I wanted to consult the experts (All HAIL the experts.... ) when it came to something that would be both built-for-speed and be extremely high quality. I'd prefer something that dumps the files directly to the .jpeg file format. I want this mainly because now I'm having to take the bitmap captures, covert them to a .jpeg, remove the widescreen bars, and then digitally watermark them via Photoshop. So any help to keep me from stretching these out of the original aspect ratio would be a great help.

Thanks guys and I look forward to getting some great advice on the situation at hand.

-- Wonka

Drop a VOB into VirtualDubMod, select the frame you want and mark an in, move one frame forward, mark out, Save Image Sequence. Then in Photoshop use the Video filter to deinterlace the picture if necessary. It's not the fastest way, but yields good results.

There are some professional solutions that make the task easier. Check out this link http://redhawkvisioninc.goemerchant2...dhawkvisioninc
Redhawk makes video pics which is a plugin for adobe, and they have paparazzi which is another solution for capturing photos from video.

I have done quite a bit of this just using Adobe Premiere 6.5 (which you can pick up for around $40.00), perform a frame capture, and then open the bmp in adobe photoshop and run an action to deinterlace and save as jpeg.

Just a few responses to your suggestions thus far.

VirtualDubMod seems to work fine, but takes a long time to really narrow down which VOB your looking to use. A pretty long loading time makes this a little unefficient for my uses due to the heavy demands on my capping (about 5 - 7 caps per film and around 15 films a week or so). It's a little too time consuming.

The RedHawk Solution really isn't something that I'm looking to do. Papparazzi costs around $ 280 dollars which is truely a joke (especially when there is no trial to even check it out!!!). And I don't have Adobe premiere but have the entire Adobe Suite on a DVD (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc..). That and I'm not really familiar with Premiere in general. So this really isn't something I want to quote, unquote INVEST cash into.

So if you have any more suggetions that don't cost a bazillion dollars or at the very least have a trial that I can unlock the entire software that would be great. I'm just looking for the best software to use that doesn't burn a hole in my wallet.

Thanks

Here is one I have read about, but I've never tried it.. http://www.topazlabs.com/tmoment.html