[Moogs]

Can anyone tell me why, when capturing screen video with Snapz or when capturing individual system windows -at three different resolutions- everything still looks exactly the same when I'm looking at the resulting files?

What gives? When I change the resolution from 1280x1024 to say 1600x1200 on my monitor, everything gets smaller, including the windows I'm capturing. Yet when I look at the movies or screens, the windows look *exactly* the same. The text, the widgets, the dimensions, everything. Same thing when I drop down to a low resolution like 1024x768.

I'm stumped on this one.

[Brad]

Are you sure you're looking at the movies and images at 100% size? Both Preview and QuickTime Player will shrink the content to fit on the screen. Zoom to 100% normal size to see what you're really captured.

I'm not exactly sure I follow what you're saying.

Would you post screenshots (of you opening other screenshots as described) that show this behavior?

[Moogs]

Yep. I checked them in Photoshop too -- even tried saving them as PSD. They all look exactly the same at 100% mag. *shrug*. I could post three but it wouldn't make any sense to post more than one. They're all 623x413 at 72 dpi.

[Brad]

That's very odd. I've worked with Snapz Pro (image and movie) since its earliest beta build for Mac OS X and I've never seen that kind of behavior.

[Moogs]

Here check it out. Every shot I snap looks like this, the only difference is the resolution that's highlighted in the list box each time.

http://homepage.mac.com/themoogs/PhotoAlbum7.html

[Moogs]

Would Quartz 2DE have anything to do with this? Maybe somewhere in my FCPS installations or Tiger activities, I've activated some setting somewhere that causes this to happen?

[Brad]

That look like a normal picture to me...

[Moogs]

This is true, but... why do all the other screenshots I take of the same exact window, even at completely different resolutions, look exactly the same? Same dimensions, appearance qualities, etc?

What I'm trying to illustrate is the impact resolution has on windows, text quality and widget size, but I see no way to accomplish this now except by manually faking it in photoshop or finding someone that has one of those screen converter things, which I know nothing about.

Shouldn't I just be able to capture at each different resolution?

[Brad]

623x413 pixels is always 623x413 pixels regardless of the display's resolution. If you look at a 623x413 image when your screen resolution is at 640x480, it'll take up most of the screen. If you look at the same image when your screen resolution is at 1600x1200, it'll take only about a quarter of the screen.

Now, if you want to simulate the relative scale of 623x413 on a 1600x1200 screen and display it on a lower resolution like, say, 640x480, you will have to manually scale down the image (and lose detail, of course) in order to get it to fit.

Does that help? This is really difficult to explain without a visual aid and I'm tempted to put together some diagrams.

[Moogs]

Yah I realize intuitively, that 623x413 is what it is. I guess I expected that when I changed resolutions and captured with Snapz, the screen utility would see the shot at its relative size, not the coded size. Stupid assumption maybe... I just figured there would be a way to do it.

I guess this begs another question: when capturing screen videos the same rule probably applies. So the FCP window I capture at 1280x1024, will look exactly the same (only not as wide) as the same window captured at 1600x1200. The only difference will be the width of the windows, because the pro interface stretches them to fit... but the widgets and controls and such are still coded at a specific size.

So there's probably no way to optimize the capture for DVD. F&^%.