Hi,
I have also done a test now and basically Power Director is incapable of making a still image capture from video retaining the quality of that video....period ! Unlike other editors and free video players that places PD at the bottom of the league for anyone with that requirement.
This is soul destroying for me as it was the only prog (costing money as well ) I found that could do what the free players can do., in that one can hit a simple hot key (or combo in PD's case Ctrl P) and be able to capture multiple stills without some pesky pop up menu asking for location and name each time, which makes the act of making 100 stills or more as I need, into something very long winded and protracted and in fact impractical. So I was so glad to find PD with its ability to go backwards and fwds frame by frame with this stills ability, something that free players cannot do. (I will however be exploring VLC further on this but I did want an alla in one package for editing and stills for what I need to do)

Attached is my finding both on your images and also my footage.

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what is wrong with this insert image control one clicks ok and it still sists ther with ok or cancel !

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and as you point out VLC has more saturation as well as recreates the true original quality detail etc of the frame.

In my clips the difference is very discernible with the images larger on screen, for some reason when they display in this forum they are reduced in size a bit.

DBenz

Quote Just found something that will be of interest to any snapshotters...

I used a UHD clip to capture the exact same frames in PhotoDirector 10, PowerDirector 17 (in Media Library as described above) and VLC Player. I took the snashots both in .JPG & .PNG format for quality comparison. As expected, all the snapshots are 3840x2160.


Hmmmm...

Cheers - Tony

Thank you, Tony, for supplying the screenshots. Back to my normal pc this morning. See the attached screenshot. I have placed all six images in the photo gallery and magnified each one to show the details, colors, artifacts of each image. Starting with Jpg on top and png on the bottom. PD17, PhD10, VLC from left to right with the file name and image size in MB added to identify each photo.

Both the PD17 jpg and png capture has less resolution when compared to the others. It looks to me like a 1920 x 1080 screen capture scaled up to 3840 x 2160 so you started with ¼ of the resolution. The vertical line detail on top of the woman’s toe is missing from both of the PD17 capture. It shows here that the uhd capture in the media library is still 1920 x 1080 scaled up artificially to uhd resolution.

It would be interesting for someone to try this test on an earlier version of PowerDirector like 14, or 12 which has the 4k screen capture on the timeline.

Hi tomasc -

It would be interesting for someone to try this test on an earlier version of PowerDirector like 14, or 12 which has the 4k screen capture on the timeline.

I've been digging into this & will post when I think I have something substantial. Comparisons have to be made using different types of video - graphic, gameplay, animation, real life - because there are some inconsistencies.

One thing I can say for sure is that PDR's JPG snapshots are w-a-a-a-y more compressed than either PhD or VLC. e.g on one particular set of JPG snapshots, JPEG Snoop reported the following compression ratios:

PDR17 Media Library: 40.99:1
PDR17 Freeze Frame: 38.18:1
PDR13 Timeline: 33.58:1
PDR13 Freeze Frame: 33.58:1
PhD10: 4.34:1
VLC: 14.73:1


That accounts for the huge difference in file sizes, but doesn't give any clues about the visual difference with PNG snapshots.

As Steve mentioned above, it's when they're viewed at 100% that the differences are obvious.

I'm still putting it together...

Cheers - Tony
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Hi Tony and everyone

Please see the post for the Comparison snapshots details made with the different software. The PD17 Media Library snapshots appear to be not as expected. The earlier versions of PD and the PD17 Freeze Frame are of high quality when compared to those from PhD10 and VLC. See if you agree from the attached 4k Compare image.

Here is the link to the post: https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/0/79984.page#328837 .

EDIT: This is the 3rd time I try to post this. Got a timeout each time. I replaced the image from a png to a jpg. and see if this works...

Hi tomasc -

I guess you started a new thread because the discussion became a bit broader, rather than specific to the OP's issue (???). Whatever your reasons, I'll follow up in the other thread.

Cheers - Tony
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