Here is a great way to De-Interlace lightning bolts taken VHS or Digital, as long as you have a way to get the footage to your pc at 60fields and 30 frames per second, which is full interlaced format.

I am sure if you have gotten video footage of a lightning bolt you have allready made a still with it somehow, and I am sure most of you have heard of De-Interlacing, well, with lightnig it can be a problem, you might think it comes out fine using your photo programs De-Interlace tool, but it is not truley the best it can be cause when you are using it, you are losing half the data of your footage, or also, half your footage resolution.

And some of you may not even know you can De-Interlace, or may not even know what it is. Well, if you have Vhs or dv footage of a lightning bolt and want to make the best still possible from it, you need to get the hardware to make it possible to get 60 feilds of your 30 frame per second footage on the pc. If you have a Dv cam, you would use a firewire card and some software to record it to pc, if you use Vhs cam, you can capture it to pc with an analog capture card, but it has to be a good capture card that captures the full resolution not 320x240, it has to capture 640x480 or 720x480, capture cards vary, but main thing, it has to get to the pc as interlaced footage.

Now once you capture it, and play it back on the pc or try to save a still, you will notice the bolt itself will be jagged and have interlaced lines going across the screen as the flash comes, the light from the bolt shifts what the camera sees so it creates a sort of motion which gives an ugly interlaced result, now this is if you have taken your footage on a tripod of coarse, you will notice a nice clean picture if you look at just the sky, no lines, but as soon as the bolt hits, walla, lines of interlaced.

Now, you can use your programs internal feature to save as a still and it will look terrible, you can also have a feature to De-Interlace it as you save, or it might be called reduce flicker, either way, its the same thing, it will look better, but you lose half your resolution and picture data doing this, you can resize the picture to 320x240 and it will look great cause you are doing the same thing, losing half your resolution, mainly the interlaced resolution, but boy, 320x240 is small.

So here is an idea I myself came up with, I was driven by my friend Terry and it forced me to come up with a fix to De-Interlace interlaced video to make nice full res stills, its not perfect, but as far as I know, I am confident it the best way and I know there is know websites out there that do this, i have seen many sites with stills of bolts that you can tell were interlaced footage, these people have no idea that there bolt can be much better then that, I hope these people see this tip and try it themselves so they can enjoy a better picture.

So anyways, the trick is to get a full resolution still from your video footage, my way is to use Studio Dv 8 and capture the video footage as the bolt hits, then go into edit mode and advance through the footage frames till I see the bolt hit, you will be looking for the frame that has all the cool branching in it, the preview in this program is small and if its a problem, you can open up your video clip in Virtual Dub whic h is very handy cause you see the footage in full resolution and how it is interlaced as the bolt hits, but I dont like how Virtual Dub decodes the Dv footage, the bolt is duller than how the Dv capture software decodes it, so I go with the smaller preview window in Studio Dv, it doesn't matter how it looks in here cause your just using it to capture a still so you can use your photo program to fix it up.

Now that you have a still made, open it in your photo program, I use Photoshop 7 so I will explain the process from with this program, you can use the idea to fix it in your own program.

Open your still picture, zoom to 100% so you can see it all nast interlaced and all, the trick is to take this picture and make 2 copies of it and De-Interlace it in the only 2 ways possible, there is an Odd Feild and an Even Feild in interlaced footage so you need to De-interlace one copy by the Even Feild and the other copy by the Od Feild, then merge this 2 together using the Lighten layer option, that will bring back all the data in your picture and you won't lose any resolution.

Step 1: Open picture, make a selection to select all and copy to clipboard.

Step 2: Deinterlace by using the Deinterlace filter from the Filter/Video menu, and De-Interlace it by Odd Feild / Interpolation.

Step 3: Paste the copy you made from the origional over this now De-Interlaced picture, and look in your layers pallette on bootom right and make sure the top layer is selected, now from the Filter/Video menu, De-Interlace this layer at Even Feild / Interpolation.

Step 4: Make sure the top layer is still selected in the layers pallette and change the layer method from Normal to Lighten, this will layer all the important data from both feilds together, which will give you a niceley De-Interlaced still.

If you compare this closely with a regular De-Interlaced still, you will then see why its better. If you have buildings around or power lines you will notice a nice clean-up in these areas compared to the regular De_interlaced photo, plus the bolts branches will be less jagged and also cleaner.

If you are a photoshop user and want a quick action made up for it, email me and I would be happy to share it with you, it will give you the option to press 1 button and the picture will be fixed up, very nifty thing photoshop has.