Blurry Images

[Mike Kujbida]

Make sure you set your Preview window to Best/Full before you do a screen grab.

[Dean Fischer]

Thanks. It is set to best/full in preview mode. I’m not capturing the images with sony vegas though. I’m capturing with snag it. Is there away to capture a full scrolling webpage with sony vegas?

Thanks again.

[Bob Peterson]

How do you know that the image is not blurry when you capture it? You should know that jpeg is not a great format for images. The format itself will create problems in the image if the compression used when saving it is too high. You should also crop the image so that it is roughly the size that Vegas needs within the video. A rule of thumb is that it should be no more than twice the video resolution as measured by horizontal and vertical pixels.

If your preview is set to best/full, you are seeing the image as it was delivered to Vegas.

[Roger Bansemer]

I bought a small sony camera and it came with a program called PMB. I don’t use it much but I can scrub through video and it will capture a frame for me that is FABULOUS. No comparison to what I can capture with Vegas even making the image full screen and using Best.

[Dean Fischer]

Thanks. I know that the capture is not blurry because it looks god in photoshop and all of my other images programs.

There’s another thing i just noticed too: The dimensions are 700×1073 and the project file is 550 widith. Even though the capture is wider than the movie, upon import it becomes really thin.

If jpeg is a bad format, which format is best?

Thanks.

[Bob Peterson]

If the original dimensions of the image are 700×1073, then you have a VERY low resolution image. It would be challenged to produce anything larger than a 4×6, and the 4×6 would be a bit marginal. However, if 700×1073 is a cropped size and the crop is being done in Photoshop, then the image must be saved in Photoshop. If you use a low quality setting (i.e. high, lossy compression) when performing this save, then the image will deteriorate.

Low resolution images tend to look “soft” or somewhat out of focus. They do not look blurred. Blurred photos look “smeared” rather than “soft”. I have never seen a soft image rendered as blurred unless a filter is applied to it.

I have never seen Vegas blur a still photo. I don’t think it is capable of making that large of a change in a photo. I would check for filters on the track where the still image is being placed. As far as format, I prefer PNG. It is lossless, and Vegas handles it very quickly and easily.

[Alex Dolgin]

Resurrecting the old thread – I started looking closer at the image quality as it is imported into Vegas 10, and noticed the same. The image that looks sharp in Photoshop, once imported and placed on the timeline, would loose some sharpness. The project setup is standard NTSC DV, preview is set to “Best, full”. I captured the monitor screen with the Vegas preview on the left, Photoshop window on the right. Also tried different file formats (PNG, JPG)- same result. There must be a good reason for that…

Dolgin Engineering
Lexington, MA
https://alexvideo.com/test5-17.jpg

[Roger Bansemer]

I have noticed that sometimes just resizing the video preview window will make a fuzzy picture become clear…

[Mike Kujbida]

[Alex Dolgin] “preview is set to “Best, full””

Then why is it set to Best-Auto in your screenshot?

“The project setup is standard NTSC DV”

Therein lies your problem.
You’re taking an image than is larger than NTSC DV (720 x 480) and expecting it to look as good after it’s been shrunk down.

“The image that looks sharp in Photoshop, once imported and placed on the timeline, would loose some sharpness.”

Any time you bring any large still image into Vegas and shrink it down, sad to say but you will lose some quality.
I can take a 3,000 x 2,000 pixel image from my Nikon digital SLR, drop it on an NTSC DV Vegas timeline and see a noticeable drop in image quality.
If I set my project properties to match that of the still image, then it looks almost as good but I can’t get that image quality on a DVD, even Blu-ray, as it doesn’t go that high (in pixel count, that is).

[Alex Dolgin]

Thank you for replying Mike. You are right, somehow the setting changed to Best/Auto from Best/Full as I was manipulating the images to position them for the screen grab. But changing to full did not improve the clarity. I think Auto matters only while playing the timeline… But the original image (on the right) is not larger than the DV frame. I cropped/scaled the original in Photoshop to 690/480 and then imported into Vegas. I thought that just importing an image is not changing it’s clarity, before rendering done. If this is not true, and some deterioration is expected as you seem to imply, no problem. I just did not want to loose quality because I did not set some setting correctly.

Alex Dolgin
Lexington, MA