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发表于 2010-3-20 00:37 · 广西
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After getting your video capture card installed, the fun part of getting screenshots from your game console begins.
Before I continue, I want to point out what kind of screenshots you can get with a video capture card and a S-Video connection. This method of getting game screenshots only goes so far. You will not be able to get pixel-perfect screenshots like game companies release, only people with development kits and special press utilities, like there is with the Xbox, can get pixel-perfect screens.
Pixel-Perfect screen released from the developer.
Screen from Video Capture Card using Dscaler
Because of the nature of games to have a lot of action and movement, and the fact that video is being deinterlaced in real time, screens of a lot of action will come out pixelled because screens are grabbed from whatever is currently in the Overlay. This is normal though for any video capture card though, and is admittedly good considering the homeuser and accessablility of the tools to take screens. The Soul Calibur II strategy guide for example, has the same "problem" with all the screens taken by the book's staff, while all the good looking screens are either released by Namco, or taken from an Xbox with the screenshot utility for the press. Resizing a screen from 640x480 to a smaller size can help make it look less pixelled.
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That said, using a video capture card with an S-Video connection for getting screens is adequate for most anyones use, fansites and professional game sites and magazines alike.
The software that comes packaged with your card is more likely than not going to give poor quality compared to 3rd party programs. The free 3rd party TV viewer, Dscaler, is needed to produce quality screens, as well as a good picture to enjoy playing games on your computer screen. Go to www.dscaler.org and click the News/Download link. For this guide I'll be using Dscaler 4.18. I believe there are some experimental features in Dscaler that are noted somewhere in the documentation which may cause your computer to crash, but we won't be dealing with any of those for taking screens so it won't be a problem.
(Dscaler in action. The Mario Kart screen was just pasted on for a mock-up shot since
it's impossible to get a picture of what Dscaler is showing with the Print Screen key.)[/ALIGN]
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- [U]Setting up Dscaler[/U][/ALIGN]
After installing Dscaler, you'll have to set some options.[/ALIGN]
For the General Hardware Setup, under the Settings menu, make sure you do not have Usage set to "Dscaler alone", or you may find your computer's resources used up.
All video games, whether PS2, GC, or Xbox, all run in a resolution of about 640x480. So unless you want your screens to come out with the width slightly stretched, make sure the Pixel Width is set to 640.
Also note, even though games have a res of 640x480, the actual size that the console draws the game screen is slightly less, most likely to fit the dimension of a TV screen, and minimize how much the console has to draw since you can't see the full 640x480 on a TV screen anyways. Some GC games for example might have a screen resolution of about 576x478 although it varies between games. The rest of the area is shown as black bars in Dscaler.
If you are using a S-Video connection, you will have to go to Bit Card->Video Input and choose S-Video, and likewise for Composite.
If you are using a Composite connection then you will want to use some of the Filters Dscaler provides. Definitely use the Temporal Comb Filter for Composite video to reduce the moving noise on the picture. Filters for the most part are not needed for an S-Video connection since the connection itself takes care of it.
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Next we'll set the Deinterlacing method by going to the Deinterlace menu. For Gamecube, Xbox, and Playstation 2, and probably any system in the last 10 years, the Deinterlace method to use is Video(Greedy, High Motion). This method seems to work best for games since they deal with lots of action and motion, and produces less artifacts from deinterlacing fast moving objects.
You'll also want to go into "Show Video Method UI" and check H. Sharpness and V. Sharpness. This will help filter the pixelation and horizontal lines that occur when things are in motion for games, although it does not give a perfect image.
Checking "Auto Pull-Down" might give some good results, and give a shaper screen. Although every few frames may contain horizontal lines, so you may have to sort through good and bad screens. You may also notice the picture will be sharpened or focused so much that you can see dots all over the screen from the S-Video connection. Auto Pull-Down seems to work well for Zelda: The Wind Waker, the sharpness showing the dots isn't so apparent after you've made a jpeg of the screen.
Also under the Deinterlace menu, be sure to uncheck Judder Terminator. I haven't seen the real need for it, and its known to take up a lot of system resources.
[U]- Setting Screen options[/U]
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To take screens in Dscaler you press the L key on the keyboard. By default screens are immediately saved to a file, which also causes a minor delay in the video your viewing.
Instead, I recommend saving screenshots to your computer's memory (RAM), and then later saving the screens you want to keep. This eliminates any delay in the video while you are playing and allows you to take pretty much every frame of the video if you hold down L, at least until you run out of memory. [/ALIGN]
In Dscaler 4.18, go to the Settings Menu and choose Still Settings. On the Still Settings list choose Stills in memory and check the box. Next, go to Maximum memory usage for stills (Mo), and set the amount of system RAM you want to provide for storing images to memory. This is dependent on the amount of RAM in your system so set it accordingly.
There are 3 file formats to save screens as: Jpeg, TIFF with RGB colorspace, and TIFF with YCbCr colorspace. The default is Jpeg set at 95% quality for compression, which gives a image with a filesize of about 100kb. I prefer to save screens as TIFFs (with RPG colorspace), since it gives an exact copy of the captured screen, although it does produce 900kb screens. I think there is a bit of loss of color and brightness when saving directly as a Jpeg, plus I will have to resave the image to make the file size around 40-50kb, so I feel there's a loss of quality there. I don't use TIFF (with YCbCr colorspace), which give 600kb screens, because they don't show up for me in Windows XP's thumbnail folder view, and that's the way I keep track of all the screens I take. Saving as Jpegs is probably more convinent and more conservative of disk space for most though.
Also in this menu, you can set the folder you want to have Dscaler save screens to by setting Save path for stills. By default, Dscaler saves to the folder it was installed in.
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When you want to view the screens you've taken in memory go to the Sources menu and choose Snapshots from the list. When your done, choose the Source menu again and select your video capture card from the list. Dscaler can also view certain image and movie files.
To save the screen your currently viewing, select the Playlist menu and choose Save for the list, or Save All if you want to save every screen you've taken. To look through all of the screens, use Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown or Ctrl + Home or End to get to the first and last screens in the list.
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The Periodic Still Pictures feature, under the Actions menu, will take a screen every few seconds, depending on what you set the Delay between stills setting in the Advanced settings menu to. For example, you can set Delay Between stills to 1 second, and using this feature, a screen will be taken every second. This might be helpful to get screens while playing the game, so your hands aren't tied up reaching to the keyboard to press L. |
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发表于 2010-3-20 00:15 · 辽宁
发表于 2010-3-20 00:53 · 广西
