The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : A Snappy New Way to Get Still-Photo Images From Video Camcorders
In this era of multimedia, it seems natural that the common video camcorder should become an accessory to the common personal computer. But it isn’t so intuitive that the camcorder could be a great source of still photos or could even serve as a high-resolution scanner for solid objects, slides, color negatives or photos.
Snappy, a new product from a new company called Play Inc. of Rancho Cordova, Calif., allows users of Windows-equipped computers to do exactly that. It retails for $200.
Snappy is a single-frame video digitizer that plugs temporarily into the computer’s printer port and yields results that range from quite good to stunning, depending on the mode of operation. (Snappy won’t work with Macintosh computers, which lack a parallel printer port.)
There are limitless business uses for graphics images. But most readily-available graphics--such as the canned images included with many software packages or the numerous photos available on CD-ROM may not be what you want.
You are more likely to need photos of your employees for a staff identification database or pictures of the products you sell to create your own catalogues. Realtors or brokers of any kind of property could serve clients better if they could show them properties on a computer screen.
The traditional way to acquire such photos has been to take high-quality photos on film, then scan the pictures with either a flatbed or 35-millimeter scanner, depending on whether the pictures are color enlargements or slides. But the equipment is expensive and the turn-around time is usually measured in days, not hours. One alternative to scanners is consumer-priced digital cameras, such as Apple’s QuickTake and Logitech’s FotoMan. But these images are small and low-resolution, and the cameras have limited storage capacity. While cheaper than digital cameras for professional photographers, they cost as much as many video camcorders.
Since many people already own camcorders and nearly everyone has a TV and a videotape recorder, wouldn’t it be convenient to take pictures from those sources and quickly digitize them onto your computer screen?
Snappy makes that possible.
A video camcorder is not a high-resolution device, but it does have essentially unlimited image-storage capacity on videotape. A television screen has less than half the resolution of an ordinary VGA computer monitor. The constantly moving images and full range of colors makes video images appear more detailed than they really are.
Yet Snappy, which is based on a proprietary video capture chip developed by Play Inc., can grab a single-frame still image from any videotape, broadcast or laser disc video source and enhance it, digitizing it into 16.8 million colors at the standard VGA resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. (Pixels are the individual dots of light that make up the image.) If that’s not good enough, Snappy also offers a much larger image of 1,500 by 1,125 pixels, also in 16.8 million colors. That’s larger than most computer monitors can display, so you typically have to scroll around to see it all.
The large image can be scaled down with appropriate photo manipulation, desktop publishing or even word processing software, yielding a high-quality image. (Snappy does not digitize full-motion video, just still frames from video).
While the still images from videotape or broadcast sources are impressive, they aren’t as sharp as a high-quality photo scanned with a high-resolution scanner. But the Snappy software has a special feature that allows a standard video camera to serve double-duty as a high-resolution camera and scanner with superb results.
It works by capturing eight successive snapshots from the video, each lasting 1/60th of a second, while the camera remains focused on a stationary subject. The software then merges the eight images into one, which is noticeably sharper than a single-frame capture.
There are four resolution choices available in the Snappy software. The three highest only work if the camera is securely mounted on a tripod and if the tripod, the subject and the lighting are absolutely motionless. Those modes capture two, four or eight frames. The fourth choice takes about five minutes to capture and process the eight images.
This is the mode to use when photographing objects for a catalogue or digitizing slides or negatives illuminated on a light table. The software can convert either black and white or color negatives into positives. Image correction adjustments allow you to get the color, brightness, contrast and other aspects just the way you want them before you save the picture in your choice of popular image formats.
The single-frame capture mode for moving images is perfect for grabbing good quality stills from a videotape of, for instance, a walk-through of a home for sale.
After tuning the image with Snappy’s software, you can save it and move on to more detailed photo manipulation. Included with Snappy are two other software packages, Fauve Matisse, a high-end painting and image-retouching program, and Grphyon Morph, a program that lets you “morph”--or transform in stages--one image into another.
It took me a while to get the best images with Snappy, using a combination of trial and error and perusing the excellent manual.
Initially, I had trouble getting the Snappy to fit onto the the recessed parallel ports in the desktop and laptop computers I tested with. That was easily fixed by using a printer extension cable to connect it. Play has tested it with cable lengths up to 25 feet.
At $200, you may not really need a business use to justify buying one. For instance, when Windows opens on my screen now, it is with a full-size picture grabbed from a video I took on my last vacation--much more pleasing than some canned Windows wallpaper image.
