screen grabs for scene selection menus - what tool / method?

[housepig]

Hey all -

searched the forum, but either there's nothing there or (more likely) I'm not using the right search terms....

I am looking for input on capturing screen shots to use for scene selection menus.

right now, what I do is take the encoded mpeg, do a quick & dirty author with DVD Lab, then open the output from DVD Lab with PowerDVD.

from PowerDVD I can pause the video and take snapshots.

what I want to know, is there a tool that will allow me to do this from the mpeg directly, without making a test dvd?

or any other methods I should try out?

thanks for any info.

[racer-x]

Why not just open the mpg in powerdvd and take the screen captures? I do it that way all the time. You'll get a better quality picture from an AVI though.

[NYPlayer]

housepig,
Why not Just play the movie in the preview of DVD lab then when you see a scene you like hit stop and drag the image to the menu?

[housepig]

Racer X -

I didn't know that PowerDVD supported straight mpeg-2 files. Now I do...

NY Player -

I'm not crazy about the frame accuracy of the preview window in DVD Lab, I find I can dial in a bit better using PowerDVD... I just didn't think that it would play mpeg-2 files directly.

thanks guys.

[adam]

Whenever you do screen captures the quality of the pic will be effected by the quality of the decoder, so it will never be completely accurate to the original. Also if you have to do many screenshots than this can be quite time consuming.

I find it much easier to either load the vob or mpg and load it into VirtualDubMod, set my in and out points and then hit file/save as image sequence. It will export one bmp for each frame in my selection. If you need, say 1 frame every 20 mins or so, then set an in and an out point on either side of these points, basically select the part you don't want, then hit delete. Go through your movie and cut out everything but the frames you want, then save the images. You can do the same thing with TMPGenc using source range and file/output to file/bmp.

You get a digital copy of your frame, so there is no quality degragation, and you can output as many frames as you want in only a few seconds.