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2008-03-27

PC DVD Software Question - Taking Screenshots

I have a question someone could hopefully solve for me. Is there any DVD software program for the PC that enables you to take screen shots at 300 dpi or more?

This is pretty essential for me if I want to publish any books with pictures. Any Ghibli book, or, say, a book about Ghibli Riffs. Thanks, all...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for all the posts on Ghibli stuff, and sorry that my first comment on your site is about unrelated technical junk! I don't know of any DVD software that does this directly, but hopefully it might offer some insight.

A confusing issue that comes up about d.p.i. is that it's a measurement relevant only to the actual physical print, and has no direct bearing on the digital image itself. What you really need for your screengrab is a source image with a large number of pixels. Video from a DVD is 720x480 pixels (generally speaking), so at most you'll get a print size of about 2.4 inches x 1.6 inches at 300 d.p.i.

What can be done to make it larger? You could enlarge the screengrab in Photoshop or similar, making sure that "resample image" is selected. This increases the total number of pixels in your image, but Photoshop has to make some best guesses about what those new pixels should look like. Hence the image could get grainy- or muddy-looking. There's an art to making good enlargements, and you can probably find some good tutorials by Googling. You could also try to get a higher-res source image to start with: if the movie is available as a BluRay/HD-DVD disc or if someone could actually scan images for you directly from the film itself (!), that would be helpful...

Good luck!

Gabriel said...

Adam is right, in the end you'll have to choose between a blurry picture or a pixelated one, if you're limited to dvd resolution. Or a good but small print. Depending on the size you would like to print, even blu-ray might not be good enough. I just opened photoshop and checked how big a 1280x528 pic would be if printed in 300dpi. It says 10,84x4,47cm. :/

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