OT: Info on how to take screen shots? Where??

Computer or camera?

Camera, use a tripod--d'uh... As far as ISO settings, etc. What type of camera are you using?

turn your flash off and use a tripod. Im no expert, but it first starts with the source which in this is is pasuing the movie at a frame which looks good.

Here is what I got using a crappy HP cam on a tripod with no flash. Im sure if I would have turnned the lights off and got into a better position the shot could have been 100% screen and would have turned out pretty good as far as a screen shot of the movie.

I just set my Olympus E-300 to auto with flash off on a tripod and it works pretty well. Also set 2 second timer so I 'm not touching it when the shutter opens.

If you're using a camera with flash off, your feed should be a 1080P feed so when you pause, you get a frame instead of a field repeated twice (1/2 res). Note there is an A-->D step when your camera has to capture the screen, and this is arguably a large source for generation loss --- the color settings will be off from what is in the actual video.

Otoh, from what I'm guessing, the best comparison (where you can do pixel deltas) come from the ability to decode the video stream directly and save the decoded YUV into disk to convert into png. That is the only lossless 'screen' capture method.

First start of with the DVE or avia disc and start taking pictures of the grey ramp test pattern pictures. Best for this would be the gray ramp pattern with top half of the screen from black to with and bottom half vice versa.

Use a tripod and a fixed position and zoom setting for all your normal screenshots. (Best to use a standard lens with a fixed focal length.)

Go for manual exposure and use the most optimum aperture setting for the lens used. This setting should give minimal vignetting of the camera lens.

Now in a dark viewing room (without flash) just start taking shots of the grey ramp pattern and vary exposure time until you get the best exposure of the grey ramp. If exposure is to long then the grey area near the white area will clip and if too short the grey near the black area will clip.
Shouldn't be too difficult to get the exposure time that shows the best gray scale ramp.

You now have calibrated your exposure setting with your projector screen combination.
Repeat this over the lamps lifetime to keep the screenshots evenly lighted.
Also keep a record of gray ramp shots with the original settings to get an impression of the lamps light loss over its lifetime.

Note down the lens settings and use these settings for every screenshot from now on.

This way metering is avoided and your screenshots should always give the correct impression of dark and light scenes.

Now color can be tricky. Start of by setting your cameras white balance for6500K.
This should get you close.

Most likely the color gamut of the camera doesn't match the color gamut of you projector.

This means photoshopping until the colors look similar to the colors on the pc screen match the projected image.
Using screen shot from the smpte test screen makes it fairly easy to measure the captured colors in photoshop and figure out the corrections needed.

Use some reference images from DVE for skin tones and other colorful images to tweak the settings a bit.

Use this workflow to apply these same corrections you found to work best to your screenshots.

This works best if you have your pc screen calibrated too....

Good thread

I copied this thread and made it a sticky in the Forum Operations Center because this question gets asked a lot

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1024326

Nice thread, wish there was more insight. Does any one have any recomendations on a good camera to do this (or anything else) with??? Looking for a good bang for your buck type deal. Also something not that difficult to use either.

Any of the "point and shoot" cameras will take a great picture of the TV. No need for the fancy stuff if you follow the advice posted above; tripod, no flash, auto settings and timer.

Trey, I'm not to be a jerk or anything. However, I need to point out that your photos have a LOT of noise in them. The Transformers shot almost has moire lines.

Fancy stuff is not really required. calibrating once is only required to get a set of fixed settings for even results across many screenshots. Automatic metering by the camera often screws up the image taken.

From your second picture I can see that the white collar is overexposed.
Now is it your TV that is adjusted bad or is the camera overexposing?

How did you get hold of screen grabs from the Apple tv HD version of Transformers?

I think the ideal method would be to capture from an internal player itself using a PC. I'm not sure if there would be any impact baised on what player software decoder you used.

I was going to say point and shoot ... but your explaination makes more sense.

That would be for screen captures, but I think this thread is to talk about ways to get better screen shots, i.e. a pic of one's display.

What set is that? It looks fantastic!

Here are a couple I took tonight after playing around with my Sony Cybershot for a while. These were taken using the Beach setting and EV at -0.7. It's a simple camera with simple settings but I think they came out well.

It is a ILA-HD10 projector on a 133" Dalite HP screen. Pictures taken from main seating position about 11' back. I may take a few more tonight of BD's and post a couple tomorrow.