Why do Premiere's frame grabs look crappy?

jamesh

jamesh

Well-known member
Why is it i can never seem to make a decent looking frame-grab from premiere pro?? The image looks nice n' sharpe in the timeline monitor but any setting i choose when export frames turns the image to crap.

Does anyone else find this problem?

I have however found a workaround which produces great results. Simply by hitting the 'Prt Screen' button on the keyboard and pasting into MS paint, cropping and saving to .BMP i've found i can make screen-grabs which are very close to how the image looks in the premiere monitor.

Here's an example:

(Footage shot in squeeze mode)

01.jpg

Export frame from Premiere '.BMP'

02.jpg

'Print Screen' & pasted into MSpaint.

The original image is pretty crappy anyway i'm sorry, it's just a test, but as you can see there is a big difference in quality.

I tried everything, .BMP, .TIFF, different aspect ratios but they always seem to come out soft and crappy. Am i doing anything wrong?


So my real questions are,

WHAT THE HELL DOES PREMIERE DO TO YOUR FOOTAGE?
WHY CAN'T IT SIMPLY MAKE AN UNCOMPRESSED FRAME GRAB LOOK DECENT?
IF IT CAN'T GET A DECENT SCREEN GRAB HOW CAN I TRUST IT'S EXPORTING VIDEO TO IT'S MAXMIMUM POTENTIAL?

I've always felt that exporting video from Premiere has a degrading effect on my footage. I look at footage from other users and think wow, and almost all of them have used other software editors. This can't just been down to my export settings or bad source footage, sometimes the difference to the naked eye between how the video looks in the monitor and how it looks as an exported frame grab is MASSIVE, but surely it shouldn't be, right?

confused rant over.

james.H
 
No way. The second image looks way better (sharper) than the first.

Don't know why it does that, but I will start print screening from now on.
 
thanks for the tip

thanks for the tip

for sure the second image looks brighter and sharper

thanks for the tip, was sure it was my fault when i tried to export a pic grab :)

now i do feel better, and i swing straight to psd and enhance it there as well, again thanks

Paul
 
does anyone actually know why Premiere isn't producing good frame grabs though? surely it's just the same process to capture whats on screen and save it to a file. it's annoying & worrying to think that it might be impacting video export quality too (which i think it is).

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jamesh said:
does anyone actually know why Premiere isn't producing good frame grabs though? surely it's just the same process to capture whats on screen and save it to a file. it's annoying & worrying to think that it might be impacting video export quality too (which i think it is).
Click to expand...
Are you working with interlaced footage and de-interlace it when you export the frames?

If yes, PPro's deinterlacing interpolate the field that is left over when you deinterlace it, thus the lower (half) resolution.

/Roger
 
It's 25P footage in a 25P timeline, field set to Progressive when exporting. So i can't understand why it looks so bad.

One thing i do wonder over though, to export the .BMP at the correct aspect ratio i have to use the 'square pixel' setting. The footage is shot in squeeze mode but when i try to use the 16x9 widescreen pixel aspect ratio it comes out squashed. Could this have anything todo with the softening of the image?
 
It's a problem with the image render codec. The best thing to do is use After Effects. When I make a movie or video, I edit in premiere then open the Premiere project file in After Effects to do any other post work. AE then uses the Premiere-imported source files to do any color correction and the rendered image is far better. This is true not only for images, but for the final exported video product as well.
 
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