Help with Still photos from AVI or MPG video.. Hints? Tips?

[harley2ride]

I have been messing around for weeks, trying to get decent photo's from captured DV or AVI. I have tried frame captures with Adobe Premiere 6.5, Vegas Video, and even Paparazzi. The photo quality sucks. I've tried opening the exported frame in Photoshop and de-interlacing, and I can't see any difference. I've tried exporting 4 frames, 3 frames, 2 frames, 1 frame, and quality is still not that good. I've looked at videosnaps, video2photo, videofocus, and a few others (haven't actually tried them yet. The problems with the photo output is mostly fuzzy, and colorization. I've even tried the remove noise filter in photoshop, and the sharpen filter. Any helpful comments, tips, would be greatly appreciated.
The video quality is very good. I'm capturing mostly from DV from a Panasonic PVGS70, via firewire which creates an MPG file, which I then edit and render with either Adobe Premiere, or Vegas Video 4.0, captured with an ADS PYRO AV/Link.

[bugster]

DV is low resolution for still photos. Converting it mpeg whilst capturing is compressing it further and reducing quality.

For best quality, capture (copy) as DV-AVI and take your stills from that. It still won't be anywhere as good as a dedicated still camera though!

[harley2ride]

I believe that my Panasonic DV camera automatically records it as mpeg2. I could be wrong through. I'll check and try to capture it as avi.

[bugster]

I believe that my Panasonic DV camera automatically records it as mpeg2.

If it does, it is not a DV camera!

DV is a common format, compressed about 5:1, and is normally stored in an avi file wrapper when copied to a PC via firewire. Use WinDv or DVIO to copy from tape to PC.

Just checked google, your camera is MiniDV, not mpeg.

[guns1inger]

it is records to DVD or HDD (the new JVC's do this) then it is mpeg2. Sony's super small tapes also use an mpeg2 compression. Anything on mini-DV tapes is DV.