[Lloyd Coleman]

I downloaded the update from the Magic Bullet website and now it works great.

[Lloyd Coleman]

I use two monitors. The trick for me is to not maximize the window (middle square in the top right corner), but use the intermediate size and then drag the window across both screens to the size you would like.

See if that works for you.

[Lloyd Coleman]

Bruce,

“hi-res” and “video clip” don’t belong in the same sentence. Standard video is only 720×480 pixels in size. This is equivalent to the picture taken with camera with less than 1/2 mega pixel (I think many camera phone are greater than this now), so you won’t be able to get a very decent print from a video grab. This is how you get the picture. Try it and see if it is good enough for your purposes:

1. Select the track the video is on.
2. Place the current time marker where you want to grab the picture from.
3. Select ‘file’ then ‘export’ then ‘frame’
4. Give the file a name and put it in the file you would like
5. In the settings box under ‘general’ chose the type of file you would like to create (bitmap, TIFF, etc)
5. In the settings box under ‘Keyframe and Rendering’ choose ‘Deinterlace Video Footage’
6. Save the file.
7. You can also deinterlace in Photoshop or other programs. Try it and see if it gives you better results than deinterlacing when you export. You can also use Photoshop to do other tings to help the print like adjust contrast, sharpen, etc to help the picture as well as increasing the resolution of the frame, although with the small size of the original I don’t think you will be able to produce a still picture that you can print very large. People often use video grabs for things like DVD covers, but they don’t often look very good.

Good luck.

[Lloyd Coleman]

This isn’t exactly what you asked for, but I think it is an easier and problably better solution. I do a lot of recruiting videos and the college coaches I talk to want to see footage that has had very little done to it (slow motion, freeze frame, music, etc.) What I have done is to identify the player at the beginning of the play and then have the effect quickly fade away so the coaches can see the whole field and other players without obstructions or being grayed out. The easiest way to do this in Premiere Pro is to open the title designer and type an ‘O’ or ‘[ ]’ or other character that you would like. You can make it any font or color that will help it stand out against the background. Place this ‘title’ over the footage and use the motion controls to size and place it over your son as the play starts. You can move the character with the motion controls to follow your son’s motion. After a second or two fade the title away.

Good luck with the recruiting video. I hope it helps your son get into the program that he would like.

[Lloyd Coleman]

If I understand what you are trying to do, I would put the sequence (timeline) with multiple tracks into a new sequence. There it will be treated like a single track that can you can change the speed on and have it affect all the tracks in the original sequence at one time.

[Lloyd Coleman]

You are right about the lower resolution stills producing less flicker. The higher resolution stills are much sharper and the sharp lines are hard for the DV codec to handle. You can blur the photos like you mentioned, but just be more agressive, or you can re-size the pictures. The downside to adding blur in Premiere is the significant increse in render times. Re-sizing the pictures has been the best solution for me. I find that making the picture about 1,000 to 1,300 pixels wide (1.5 – 2 times the resolution of video) allows me to zoom in for the Ken Burns effect without flicker becoming a problem. If you are used to working with still digital files you will be suprised that a picture that looks very soft for print will look good on TV.

[Lloyd Coleman]

If you are using Premiere Pro you do the following:

Edit>Preferences>Still Images and set the ‘Default Duration’ to the number of frames you want the still to be. If you are using the standard NTSC 29.97 frames/sec then put 30 in the box to make the stills last 1 second each.

[Lloyd Coleman]

Apply the ‘unsharp mask’ filter. Play with the radius and amount until it looks the best. It won’t look as good as a well focused shot, but it will improve it quite a bit. Be careful not to overdo it.

[Lloyd Coleman]

I just talked to Mark at MainConcept and he said that when you export using Microsoft DV AVI it does use the MainConcept encoder, even though there is not a place to specificially select MainConcept and the name still says Microsoft DV AVI.