Wide World of Women

Could someone please tell what the best settings are for making caps using EyeTV software and the VLC player? (sometimes my caps aren't as sharp)

EyeTV
Brightness -
Contrast -
Color -
Hue -
Sharpness -

VLC Player (under image adjust)
Image contrast -
Image brightness
Image hue
Image saturation
Image gamma




Thanks for any advice

Honestly I've never really adjusted too many settings except for interlacing and image save format. You can tweak the pics with picture adjustment, but in the end the quality of caps is going to depend on the quality of the source. My advice would be if you have any settings for bitrate on your recording software, make sure you set it to the highest. After that save as .png or .bmp then convert to .jpg. Often if you cap directly as .jpg on the fly you get less than optimal results.

Thanks for the reply Kevin, I agree the .jpg are definitely inferior than the .png but the .png takes up loads of memory.

Yeah, they're big files, but only temporary. You can compress to jpeg later with freeware like irfanview, or most other picture software has some type of jpeg compression capability. The main point is saving as jpeg while you cap makes less quality caps than if you save as .bmp or .png then use software to save as .jpg.

Yes, I agree with donkeed: Save as PNG and convert to JPG. I'd suggest not changing any settings in VLC other than turning deinterlacing on and setting it to "blend" (preferably). Other than that, you should be fine!

FastStone Photo Resizer is great for converting to different formats and naming/numbering your caps by the way.

Thanks Chris

Your caps always look impeccable, I wish mine could look like yours. My hdtv is a 720p and my cable box is set to 720p. Admittedly I am a novice when it comes to terms like deinterlacing and progressive, but using the vlc player like I do to generate my caps, is there an explanation why my caps don't look as sharp as yours do. Should I turn deinterlacing off or switch the mode to linear or another option? I tried blend like you said and pretty much got the same results as this cap. And if it's 720 progressive does that mean I should turn deinterlacing off?

Here's an example of what I mean, this looks good but it doesn't have the sharpness and clarity the way your caps always do

One thing I would do when recording is set the output to the resolution of the station. If you output 1080i for 720p, you lose the progressive scan without really improving the image quality. Think of taking a 640x480 pic and resizing it to 1280x960. It's pointless. Also the same if you output 720p with 1080i source. You lose resolution while not changing the fact that the original video is interlaced. Check to see if your cable/sat box has a setting to automatically switch formats to the native resolution of the channel. I know Directv receivers and DVR's have the setting, and Fios does not. It can be a pain to manually change it every time, but well worth it IMO...especially if you're recording to take stills.

Thanks Kevin, your advice has made all the difference