Video and Photo Question

I have converted some old family movies from the 1930’s to video on DVD and I wanted to take the best quality still pictures from the videos. Is there a particular application that someone can reccomend for this or will something like a screen capture utility with good timing be just as good?
Also, there’s a chain of family portrait stores down here called portr@it innov@tions – they use a pretty neat feature on their software for cropping their pictures – it shows two different outlines in different colors of standard photo sizes such as 4×6 etc in both landscape and portrait orientation which they can drag right over the image to let the customer get an idea of how they can crop the picture without loosing the ratio – any good programs that you guys think might do the same?
Thanks in advance for any help and hopefully I’ve posted in the right forum.
Answer #1
As far as getting good quality still pictures from a video, I would use ImageGrabber II. It can grab screenshots from almost any video file (avi, mpg, dat, asf, wmv, qt, mov, rm, rmvb, vob) and save the screenshot as customized thumbnails to a single file or multiple files. http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ImageGrabber
Answer #2
I’ll look for it – as far as the customized thumbnail is concerned, I am not sure what that means exactly, a thumbnail as in a reduced picture one can look at a glance?
Answer #3
ImageGrabber II can save files that are the same resolution as the source video file. If you have a 1080p video, it is able to save JPEG image files that are 1920×1080 pixels, which is the same as the video. It can also save a single image that contains multiple thumbnails along with timestamps. You can either tell it which frames to save manually, or you can tell it a number of screenshots you want and it will decide what frames to save. It does not support all types of video, but it does support a wide variety.
Here is an example of the full resolution images:

Here is an example of the thumbnails in a single image:

Answer #4
That’s stunning!
I went and researched it here and it seems most everyone really likes this program. I found a great sticky thread on all this with some tutorials.
Thank you for taking the time to post these samples – I am a believer.
And I take it, from the large picture, that one does not have to have the time stamp on the picture/s, or is that just for the single picture and not the multiple shots-in-one?
Also, do you know if this program is Vista compatible or is it just for XP and what’s the difference between the .NET and standard version?
Someone mentioned another two programs:
VirtualDub and Frameshots any experience with these – pros/cons?
Again, thanks
Answer #5
the above frame by is 1600px � 900px from a 1600px � 900px HD source
VirtualDub and Frameshots any experience with these - pros/cons?
virtualdub will give you and exact copy of the frame (same as all the others) but no thumbnails
so if the file resolution is say 640×480 that will be the size of the pics
Answer #6
Well it was 1920×1080 when Image Grabber II saved it, but tinypic shrunk it. Here’s a RS link to the full resolution picture:
http://~ Dead file host ~/files/250578422/00-33-19.jpg
Answer #7
but tinypic shrunk it.
ah !
thot that was a weird resolution was just trying to get the point across that the screen shots will be the frame size of the original video