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Can You Send a Single MPEG File to Printer?
Morgan Paar: Hey, welcome to Letters and Tips. I’m Morgan Paar.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton.
Morgan Paar: Charlie, do you want to start with the first one?
Charlie Fulton: Sure. I’ve got a question here from Ron Edwards, he’s asking, is there a way to send to printer a single MPEG frame? He says Nero 6 and the software that comes with this Sony product doesn’t seem to enable that feature.
So, I’m thinking, and DVD player program. I know Power DVD can do it, I bet WinDVD can probably do it, if you have it on DVD, you can usually do frame grabs from that.
Morgan Paar: And I was just thinking bringing it to an editing program, and from there-
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Morgan Paar: You could export stills. Just about any program I can think of, you could do that. We actually have a question coming a little later about exporting stills, so maybe you could be patient until we get down there, but look into, look into your programs and see if you can export a still. Usually we could find it just under Still. Do a search of Still and you could find out how to do that.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. There might even be an icon somewhere by your monitor window that will let you just grab a still that easily.
Morgan Paar: I think right at the QuickTime you can do it.
Charlie Fulton: Oh, yeah.
Morgan Paar: I’ve done it, so, you can bring it to Photoshop, you could try to resize, resample, you can adjust the colors and make it look better for printing.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Yeah.
Morgan Paar: We’ll talk a little bit more about that towards the end.
So, that was sent by e-mail. This next one was sent by an e-mail also, from Carol Spano. Carol asks, I subscribed to your magazine which I find very informative. I am in a quandary to find best LCD monitor for video work. Can you help me with this? I’ve been searching and going crazy trying to find this information.
LCD, this is all you, Charlie.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. And ironically enough, I’m looking for a new LCD for myself, so, you’ve got us at a perfect time.
So, I would say, at a very minimum you’d want something that can display at least 1280 by 1024, that would be a 17’’ and up monitor. I noticed you said LCD, and that’s good. CRT is probably not even worth considering at this point, unless you’re doing some really high quality color work where you got to have high color accuracy. And then it has to be said that the color accuracy at LCDs is getting better all the time.
If you’re playing a lot of games, or you play a lot of video, you’ll want a high refresh rate of the panel. 16 milliseconds has become very common, and that’s about the minimum I’d consider using. And this also corresponds to one sixteenth of the second, 16 and 31 milliseconds, if you work it all out.
I’d go with the DVI input. If you’ve got a computer that has a DVI output, then you’re skipping the whole unnecessary conversion back to VGA and then back to the panel. So, we’d recommend DVI if you can do it.
And, you know, you might want to consider one with the card reader, or USB, or a pivoting display if you do graphics for… there’s a lot of different features out there. You just have to look for them, and you’ll find them. And most of them are really good price now.
Good for everybody.
Morgan Paar: You know, I’ve got a 24’’, and I love it. 24’’ monitor. And I know a couple of companies have just come out with some 30’’ monitors.
Charlie Fulton: Really?
Morgan Paar: So, now the difference is, you’re going to spend a little bit more for 30’’, where you might be able to get something like 217’’ LCD are cheaper.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: A lot of editors are used to work with two monitors, so if your computer can output to two monitors, if your video card will allow you to do that, that’s, may be a lower cost option, to get 217’’ as opposed to a 30’’.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Morgan Paar: Now, I don’t have a television at home, so I use my monitor at home which at home, I think I have a 21’’. I use that as my TV, so, if you’re doing that, you might want consider spending a little bit more for that 30’’.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely. And that’s a good plan about the two monitors, so if you have them right next to each other, you can spread out your timelines and have a whole bunch of extra monitor windows open. It makes a video editing a lot more pleasurable experience.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. All right. So, good luck with that purchase.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, yeah. Shall I read this one or do you want to?
Morgan Paar: Go for it.
Charlie Fulton: Okay.
I’ve got letter here from Dotty Hall, and she says, I enjoy your magazine very much, and I would like to know. After you finish making your video and have burned it to a DVD, how do you present it to an audience? What’s the best possible way? You go to your DVD player, or a laptop, and what about the sound?
So that’s an interesting question. What would be the determining factors? Like the size of the venue and how many people you’ve got watching?
Morgan Paar: That’s what I’d say, yeah. I’m thinking about some stuff we’ve done up here. We played a video, at our Expos, we always play video. We use rear projector, rear projection, and that’s kind of expensive.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: For us average folk. Projectors in general, front projectors, are coming down in price.
Charlie Fulton: They are.
Morgan Paar: And going up in quality. You’re still probably talking about over a $1000?
Charlie Fulton: Generally for the ones worth considering, yeah.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. I’ve seen some for less than $1000. I haven’t tested them. I am not quite sure. That’s the price that you’re talking about. And there’s always possibility of renting. If you have a large monitor, maybe you can get away with this. We’ve used this in our company meetings, so, we’re talking about 25 people sitting in a room. That’s worked.
Charlie Fulton: What would be another solution?
Morgan Paar: So, projectors, large monitors.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. That pretty much rounds it up, really.
Morgan Paar: I think so.
Charlie Fulton: There are some pretty big LCDs now, too. Like you just said, so, yeah.
Morgan Paar: Wait, this is 42’’ right here?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. This is a plasma, though.
Morgan Paar: Okay. So you can imagine having 15 people in a room, maybe 20, this could be an option for you.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: And then, as far as speakers, the better sound you can get out, the better.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely. You definitely want to use something external as opposed to the TV speakers. They’re usually not so great, but if you’re using it in a small room, then sometimes it’s possible.
Definitely you want, if you’re using a big venue, you want a big set of speakers.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. I mean, we’ve, when we were in the small room, we’ve even used a boom box that accepts input, you can get away with that. If you’re in a bigger venue, maybe in a bigger café, you’re shooting there, or a small theatre, you’re going to maybe even want to rent some speakers.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Morgan Paar: Yeah.
Charlie Fulton: All right.
Morgan Paar: Scott Jones from Kingsport, Tennessee, wrote in, I was reading your December 05 tech support column, which I probably wrote, I guess, on making a still from video, and printing it for photography. I won’t go too much beyond that, because it’s basically the question.
This is kind of a big topic. And let’s see. I wrote about this in the December 05 issue. Maybe there’s more I can write. Maybe we could do a step by step.
Charlie Fulton: That might be-
Morgan Paar: A really good idea.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Morgan Paar: And the main problem that Scott was writing in about was square and non-square pixels.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Morgan Paar: So, mini DV uses non-square pixels. And that’s going to run into a little bit of trouble when you bring your editor to manipulate it.
So, I know a lot of people use Photoshop CS. CS2 has got a lot of functionality for, specifically for video. What are some other photo editors?
Charlie Fulton: I would imagine like you could do the same like with the Gimp, or Corel photo paint, or, what are some others here? Those are three of probably the big ones. Photoshop being the man and pan gorilla, naturally.
Morgan Paar: So, if the functionality is not in the software itself, then a simple button to just click non-square into square, then you will have to do a little bit math. You can find this on the Internet, if you want to resample, not necessarily want to resize but resample these photos.
And then there’s also some other issues. Your dis-, the image that you get from the video is going to be 72 DPI, usually for magazine we like to print at minimum of 300 DPI.
Charlie Fulton: 300 is what we go for, yeah.
Morgan Paar: So, now you’re dealing with resampling, or if the image that you’re trying to print on the paper is small enough, you might get away with, because of that you have resample, it’s going to get smaller.
But if you’re trying to print a magazine, we run into that problem quite a bit. So…
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. I think that’s all we have. Let’s see, if you’ve got any questions about video in general, or you just want to say hello, send us an e-mail at editor@videomaker.com. And you can also visit us in forums at videomaker.com/forums, or in the blog at videomaker.com/blog.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. So we want to hear from you. Contact us in all three of those places- Internet, blog, and in the forums. You can contact us.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: All right. Stay tuned. We have coming up another one of our winners in our video contest. This is a great piece that is next, correct, yes. All right.
Morgan Paar: Hey, welcome to Letters and Tips. I’m Morgan Paar.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton.
Morgan Paar: Charlie, do you want to start with the first one?
Charlie Fulton: Sure. I’ve got a question here from Ron Edwards, he’s asking, is there a way to send to printer a single MPEG frame? He says Nero 6 and the software that comes with this Sony product doesn’t seem to enable that feature.
So, I’m thinking, and DVD player program. I know Power DVD can do it, I bet WinDVD can probably do it, if you have it on DVD, you can usually do frame grabs from that.
Morgan Paar: And I was just thinking bringing it to an editing program, and from there-
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Morgan Paar: You could export stills. Just about any program I can think of, you could do that. We actually have a question coming a little later about exporting stills, so maybe you could be patient until we get down there, but look into, look into your programs and see if you can export a still. Usually we could find it just under Still. Do a search of Still and you could find out how to do that.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. There might even be an icon somewhere by your monitor window that will let you just grab a still that easily.
Morgan Paar: I think right at the QuickTime you can do it.
Charlie Fulton: Oh, yeah.
Morgan Paar: I’ve done it, so, you can bring it to Photoshop, you could try to resize, resample, you can adjust the colors and make it look better for printing.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Yeah.
Morgan Paar: We’ll talk a little bit more about that towards the end.
So, that was sent by e-mail. This next one was sent by an e-mail also, from Carol Spano. Carol asks, I subscribed to your magazine which I find very informative. I am in a quandary to find best LCD monitor for video work. Can you help me with this? I’ve been searching and going crazy trying to find this information.
LCD, this is all you, Charlie.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. And ironically enough, I’m looking for a new LCD for myself, so, you’ve got us at a perfect time.
So, I would say, at a very minimum you’d want something that can display at least 1280 by 1024, that would be a 17’’ and up monitor. I noticed you said LCD, and that’s good. CRT is probably not even worth considering at this point, unless you’re doing some really high quality color work where you got to have high color accuracy. And then it has to be said that the color accuracy at LCDs is getting better all the time.
If you’re playing a lot of games, or you play a lot of video, you’ll want a high refresh rate of the panel. 16 milliseconds has become very common, and that’s about the minimum I’d consider using. And this also corresponds to one sixteenth of the second, 16 and 31 milliseconds, if you work it all out.
I’d go with the DVI input. If you’ve got a computer that has a DVI output, then you’re skipping the whole unnecessary conversion back to VGA and then back to the panel. So, we’d recommend DVI if you can do it.
And, you know, you might want to consider one with the card reader, or USB, or a pivoting display if you do graphics for… there’s a lot of different features out there. You just have to look for them, and you’ll find them. And most of them are really good price now.
Good for everybody.
Morgan Paar: You know, I’ve got a 24’’, and I love it. 24’’ monitor. And I know a couple of companies have just come out with some 30’’ monitors.
Charlie Fulton: Really?
Morgan Paar: So, now the difference is, you’re going to spend a little bit more for 30’’, where you might be able to get something like 217’’ LCD are cheaper.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: A lot of editors are used to work with two monitors, so if your computer can output to two monitors, if your video card will allow you to do that, that’s, may be a lower cost option, to get 217’’ as opposed to a 30’’.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Morgan Paar: Now, I don’t have a television at home, so I use my monitor at home which at home, I think I have a 21’’. I use that as my TV, so, if you’re doing that, you might want consider spending a little bit more for that 30’’.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely. And that’s a good plan about the two monitors, so if you have them right next to each other, you can spread out your timelines and have a whole bunch of extra monitor windows open. It makes a video editing a lot more pleasurable experience.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. All right. So, good luck with that purchase.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, yeah. Shall I read this one or do you want to?
Morgan Paar: Go for it.
Charlie Fulton: Okay.
I’ve got letter here from Dotty Hall, and she says, I enjoy your magazine very much, and I would like to know. After you finish making your video and have burned it to a DVD, how do you present it to an audience? What’s the best possible way? You go to your DVD player, or a laptop, and what about the sound?
So that’s an interesting question. What would be the determining factors? Like the size of the venue and how many people you’ve got watching?
Morgan Paar: That’s what I’d say, yeah. I’m thinking about some stuff we’ve done up here. We played a video, at our Expos, we always play video. We use rear projector, rear projection, and that’s kind of expensive.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: For us average folk. Projectors in general, front projectors, are coming down in price.
Charlie Fulton: They are.
Morgan Paar: And going up in quality. You’re still probably talking about over a $1000?
Charlie Fulton: Generally for the ones worth considering, yeah.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. I’ve seen some for less than $1000. I haven’t tested them. I am not quite sure. That’s the price that you’re talking about. And there’s always possibility of renting. If you have a large monitor, maybe you can get away with this. We’ve used this in our company meetings, so, we’re talking about 25 people sitting in a room. That’s worked.
Charlie Fulton: What would be another solution?
Morgan Paar: So, projectors, large monitors.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. That pretty much rounds it up, really.
Morgan Paar: I think so.
Charlie Fulton: There are some pretty big LCDs now, too. Like you just said, so, yeah.
Morgan Paar: Wait, this is 42’’ right here?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. This is a plasma, though.
Morgan Paar: Okay. So you can imagine having 15 people in a room, maybe 20, this could be an option for you.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: And then, as far as speakers, the better sound you can get out, the better.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely. You definitely want to use something external as opposed to the TV speakers. They’re usually not so great, but if you’re using it in a small room, then sometimes it’s possible.
Definitely you want, if you’re using a big venue, you want a big set of speakers.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. I mean, we’ve, when we were in the small room, we’ve even used a boom box that accepts input, you can get away with that. If you’re in a bigger venue, maybe in a bigger café, you’re shooting there, or a small theatre, you’re going to maybe even want to rent some speakers.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Morgan Paar: Yeah.
Charlie Fulton: All right.
Morgan Paar: Scott Jones from Kingsport, Tennessee, wrote in, I was reading your December 05 tech support column, which I probably wrote, I guess, on making a still from video, and printing it for photography. I won’t go too much beyond that, because it’s basically the question.
This is kind of a big topic. And let’s see. I wrote about this in the December 05 issue. Maybe there’s more I can write. Maybe we could do a step by step.
Charlie Fulton: That might be-
Morgan Paar: A really good idea.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Morgan Paar: And the main problem that Scott was writing in about was square and non-square pixels.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Morgan Paar: So, mini DV uses non-square pixels. And that’s going to run into a little bit of trouble when you bring your editor to manipulate it.
So, I know a lot of people use Photoshop CS. CS2 has got a lot of functionality for, specifically for video. What are some other photo editors?
Charlie Fulton: I would imagine like you could do the same like with the Gimp, or Corel photo paint, or, what are some others here? Those are three of probably the big ones. Photoshop being the man and pan gorilla, naturally.
Morgan Paar: So, if the functionality is not in the software itself, then a simple button to just click non-square into square, then you will have to do a little bit math. You can find this on the Internet, if you want to resample, not necessarily want to resize but resample these photos.
And then there’s also some other issues. Your dis-, the image that you get from the video is going to be 72 DPI, usually for magazine we like to print at minimum of 300 DPI.
Charlie Fulton: 300 is what we go for, yeah.
Morgan Paar: So, now you’re dealing with resampling, or if the image that you’re trying to print on the paper is small enough, you might get away with, because of that you have resample, it’s going to get smaller.
But if you’re trying to print a magazine, we run into that problem quite a bit. So…
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. I think that’s all we have. Let’s see, if you’ve got any questions about video in general, or you just want to say hello, send us an e-mail at editor@videomaker.com. And you can also visit us in forums at videomaker.com/forums, or in the blog at videomaker.com/blog.
Morgan Paar: Yeah. So we want to hear from you. Contact us in all three of those places- Internet, blog, and in the forums. You can contact us.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Morgan Paar: All right. Stay tuned. We have coming up another one of our winners in our video contest. This is a great piece that is next, correct, yes. All right.
