Somewhat OT: Taking stills of suits from movies

[J. Brisbin]

I've been wanting to post some stills from silent movies and old TCM movies for a while here, (for the purposes of example/discussion, etc...) but not terribly sure how to approach this technically.

I can record the movies onto my DVR, so I can pause them, etc... to get a good shot of the character's clothing, but I didn't want to just take a digital photo of the TV screen (that never seems to work very well). I wanted something high-enough quality that I could deduce measurements from it (I was a photo interpreter in the USAF in a former life...used to do this all the time), but to do that, I'd need some kind of direct feed from the DVR.

I think my digital video camera has an input on it that I could play from the DVR into the camera, then copy that footage onto the PowerBook and grab the stills from there?

The more of these old movies I watch, the more information I see just floating around in there, waiting to be harvested, but if it's stuck in my DVR, there's not much I can do with it. Any suggestions?

 

[Edward]

I'm an ignoramus on the technical issues here, but basically you're looking to put stills from a DVD onto the PC? I know folks who have done this for Rocky Horror costume issues (believe me, you ain't seen anally retentive until you hear some of us arguing over a stitching line on as character's shoe, colour and density of sequin placement.... and on!). What they did was fire the DVD into the PC's player and use a DVD -player software program to copy individual "frames". I believe they used a program called Power DVD... That's all I know, hope it helps some.

 

[J. M. Stovall]

It would probably be easier to rent it from Netflix and grab it on the computer.

And on the Mac a program called Snapz Pro will let you do the screen grabs, Apple's Grab application will not.

 

[J. M. Stovall]

You could do it with your digital camera too like you described, but you will have gigs of files to contend with.