Shooting film stills from a LCD screen and TV?

[tony_black1]

Is there any special technique for this?

 

I would like to shoot from my laptops LCD screen some stills of DVD movies? Or

from a TV screen?

 

I would like to get the best quality possible?

 

I can shoot both digital or film? Just want to capture the best quality?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Matt Laur]

Tony: you can certainly use any number of screen capture utilities to grab a full-frame, pixel-for-pixel snapshot of what's on your computer's display... and it will always be in perfect focus/exposure, and you can save it right to a file in one step.

 

There are also quite a few hardware widgets that will let you treat your computer as a cable (or even broadcast) tuner... and then you can do the same thing with those signals.

[tony_black1]

how do you do the screen capture while a dvd is playing on the screen?

[tony_black1]

ok i press the screen capture button and opened it up on windows paint. it just shows a black screen. not the image on the dvd.

 

besides that the resolution will be very low. i would like to make very big prints.

[tony_black1]

ok i captured the image by using the dvd software but the resolution is 840x440 @ 300dpi. its very low. i want to make really big prints. so i guess i have to shoot from the screen with an film slr camera.

[Matt Laur]

Tony: whether you up-rez the screen capture, or use a high-res digital camera, or use film... it's still the same number of pixels coming off the DVD. You won't make the screen shot contain any more information by capturing it on film.

[helenbach]

Further to what Matt said, if it isn't being played at its native resolution on the LCD screen it will have already gone through a real-time resampling process that might not be as appropriate for use with still images as those available in Photoshop, for example.

 

Best,

Helen

[steve_dunn2]

<p>In North America and many other parts of the world, standard definition TV (including DVD) is about a third of a megapixel (once it's been de-interlaced) for 4:3, up to around half a megapixel for 16:9. Even high-def is only roughly 1 megapixel (720p) or 2 megapixels (1080i, once it's been de-interlaced). That's all the resolution that's in the original video, so you can shoot it with as high a resolution camera as you like but in essence what you'll get is the same as if you took an image from the original resolution and scaled it up in Photoshop.</p>

[matthew_newton]

Pretty much what Steve said. The native resolution is such that you aren't going to make particularly large prints unless you want low DPI. Its kind of like trying to take a picture of a 4x6" print and expecting to make a high quality 20x30" out of it. Your camera is not going to capture any more resolution then is already present. As for a TV screen I wouldn't bother, an interlaced still picture is much blurrier then a non-interlaced picture. As far as I know playing a DVD on a computer monitor still results in an interlaced equivelent image as that is what was recorded to the DVD (though I could be wrong on that).

[re_photography]

I was preparing a severe, albeit informative, rant on this, but pretty much everything regarding native resolution and interlacing issues has been fairly thoroughly covered. This being the case, I'll just add that your intention of making "really big prints" from captures of the movie is also quite ILLEGAL.