Cleaning up ugly screencaps?

Hi,

I'm trying to build a screen-captures gallery for a site, and I'm having big problems getting a good looking screen capture. Right now, when I take a screen-cap while playing a DVD, it looks like this:

http://www.lonelyangel.com/random_stuff/screencap_sample.jpg

and I would like to get something close to this:

http://www.lonelyangel.com/images/official_art/pics/off_007.jpg

with as little work as possible, of course (since I'll have to make hundreds of these). Anyone have general tips for this? Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure about this, but my guess is that you are running into the limitations of the format you are using for playback and or capture. Maybe it's even an issue of too much video compression being applied during the capture process? What kind of video card are you using? How are you capturing? Are you using an external DVD player and capturing with the video card or are you using the computer's DVD drive for playback and capturing some other way?

Tell us more about your specific setup and method of capturing and maybe it will be more clear where the weak link in the chain is.

Right now I'm using a PowerDVD player to take screencaps. I'm running 1280x1024 res, 32-bit color, with a 3dfx voodoo3 AGP graphics card. My DVD player is internal, 16x, some brand called Norcent. I took screencaps by playing the DVD on full-screen mode and using the 'capture-to-file' feature that's built in to the PowerDVD software, so that it spits out a .bmp file every time i hit the capture command.

I did take a look at the config settings for the dvd player software, but I'm not sure what adjustments I can make there to help the image quality... any ideas?

I'm still not clear on a solution for you (and may not have one anyway), but how does the playback look on your screen when you are playing the DVD? Is the bitmap an accurate representation of what you see on your screen? Or is it noticably degraded compared to what you see in real time while the DVD plays? If it's degraded then your software seems like it is *optimizing* or compressing the image somehow. I don't know anything about your program so you'll have to look for those kind of settings and ensure that nothing is being optimized, compressed or any kind of hardware acceleration is happening in the software program itself. Check your manual for quality settings.

If the DVD is playing back the video with this degradation, then obviously that's what's going to get captured.

Other than that, I can't be of any more help. Hopefully somebody will chime in here and set us *both* straight!

One other thing, not to run you off, but I'm guessing that this question would be better addressed in a forum that deals with video editing like for Adobe Premeire, Ulead Studio, etc.. If you find that you are stuck with the quality you currently have now, there are ways to make it look better in Photoshop, but it sounds like it might be very time consuming considering the number of images that you'll be working with.