Video Frame Capture

[1990RangerinSK]

As part of my love for photography, I sometimes use video to try to capture something (like a bird in flight, or a train going by) so that I can get exactly the shot I want, without having to take a million pictures (doing it this way is faster, believe it or not).

I need some software that I can run the video through, that will pull out each individual frame. VNC can supposedly do it, but when I tried it last year, I got a gazillion copies of one frame, and no captures of any other frames.

Any ideas?

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

I'm interested too.

 

[Josh B]

I think Apple QuickTime has some premium software that does it but I've never been that anxious to buy it.
There has been times when I wanted a still shot from one and got the frame on the computer and then snapped it off the screen onto the camera. That will lower the resolution somewhat but still makes it possible to share one frame instead of having to post the entire video.

On a stormy night once I was out taking lightening shots when I noticed something very dark across the fields a couple miles away coming in my direction but the camera wouldn't pick up so I put it on movie and filmed it a bit. It was an eerie looking thing floating across the sky real low but wasn't making any noise. At some points I felt the hair on back of my neck stand up.
After getting back to the house and watching the video it caught a lightning flask and showed the perfect funnel of a tornado drifting along a hundred feet or so off the ground.
I snapped the shot from the computer and posted it on Wunderground. They wouldn't post it because it had been snapped from a computer :/

 

[1990RangerinSK]

I think Apple QuickTime has some premium software that does it but I've never been that anxious to buy it.
There has been times when I wanted a still shot from one and got the frame on the computer and then snapped it off the screen onto the camera. That will lower the resolution somewhat but still makes it possible to share one frame instead of having to post the entire video.

On a stormy night once I was out taking lightening shots when I noticed something very dark across the fields a couple miles away coming in my direction but the camera wouldn't pick up so I put it on movie and filmed it a bit. It was an eerie looking thing floating across the sky real low but wasn't making any noise. At some points I felt the hair on back of my neck stand up.
After getting back to the house and watching the video it caught a lightning flask and showed the perfect funnel of a tornado drifting along a hundred feet or so off the ground.
I snapped the shot from the computer and posted it on Wunderground. They wouldn't post it because it had been snapped from a computer :/

Might be interesting to look into that. At the moment, it looks like Apple has killed it for Windows. The latest version was 2016(ish).

What I do right now is I use the stock media player that comes with Windows, find the frame I want, and screenshot it. Don't use your camera to get what you're after from your computer screen. Unfortunately, that method is really hard to catch a bird that flits across the screen. But, I've gotten some great shots of rail stock that way.

 

[Josh B]

I haven't liked Windows imaging programs since 2K Pro, although read it has some fairly decent features in it but can't remember now what it was I was trying to do.

Until 2K Pro they used a Kodak imaging that I really liked

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Over my head but maybe of use?

Extract frames as an image from video files using FFMPEG

There are some common techniques for data augmentation. One of them is to record a video which contains objects that will be trained in…

medium.com

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Another maybe helpful thought;

"If you don’t want to a use a 1 line ffmpeg command to “extract frames” from your video file, VLC lets you step through a video frame by frame (usually bound to the “e” key) and has a “Take snapshot” function under the video menu"

PS I'm pulling these from another forum I'm on.

VLC;

Official download of VLC media player, the best Open Source player - VideoLAN

www.videolan.org

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

More info;

"
I don’t know which equipment is used or how high quality the images are supposed to be in the end, but a video recording is of lesser quality for one thing, and dependant on the codec for another.


On most cameras the video gets recorded as H.264 directly, which is nice for compression, but not nice for working with it.


The issue with H.264 is that it doesn’t store every frame. It stores keyframes, and the frames in between this keyframe and the next keyframe only store whatever was changed from the previous frame.
So say we have a 3 second video with a keyframe intervall of 10, and we record at 30 fps.
3 seconds * 30 fps = 90 frames total. At a keyframe interval of 10 we have 9 keyframes (starting at 0) that store the whole frame. The other 81 frames are incremental of their previous frame. Meaning if you want to pull a frame from 2.5 second, it would go to the last keyframe before it (2.5 * 30 = 75; so the last keyframe before that is at 70), and build the image incremental from there.


Again, this is nice for compression, but not nice when working with it. If you (or your friend) are unlucky, restoring a single frame might be more of a headache in the long run then just doing a “rapid fire” mode (which most cameras support as well), that shoots say 5 images a second and stores them all in full resolution".

 

[ericbphoto]

More info;

"
I don’t know which equipment is used or how high quality the images are supposed to be in the end, but a video recording is of lesser quality for one thing, and dependant on the codec for another.


On most cameras the video gets recorded as H.264 directly, which is nice for compression, but not nice for working with it.


The issue with H.264 is that it doesn’t store every frame. It stores keyframes, and the frames in between this keyframe and the next keyframe only store whatever was changed from the previous frame.
So say we have a 3 second video with a keyframe intervall of 10, and we record at 30 fps.
3 seconds * 30 fps = 90 frames total. At a keyframe interval of 10 we have 9 keyframes (starting at 0) that store the whole frame. The other 81 frames are incremental of their previous frame. Meaning if you want to pull a frame from 2.5 second, it would go to the last keyframe before it (2.5 * 30 = 75; so the last keyframe before that is at 70), and build the image incremental from there.


Again, this is nice for compression, but not nice when working with it. If you (or your friend) are unlucky, restoring a single frame might be more of a headache in the long run then just doing a “rapid fire” mode (which most cameras support as well), that shoots say 5 images a second and stores them all in full resolution".

Whoa. That is all great info and I'm glad you shared it. But that was a lot for me to learn before I finish my waffles.

Thanks anyway.

 

[Ranger850]

I didn't read any thing but the 1st post. I am a videographer in my very little spare time and I use Pinnacle Studio Pro 11. It's a step down from AVID Pro, but made by AVID, lol. (AVID is the "ProTools" for video and the "Hollywood Standard") Frame grabs will also depend on your FPS (frames per second) ratio, but you probably already know that part. I grab frames all the time, with little effort, or editing after. Fir the price of the program, $80-120, you cant beat it.

 

[1990RangerinSK]

I didn't read any thing but the 1st post. I am a videographer in my very little spare time and I use Pinnacle Studio Pro 11. It's a step down from AVID Pro, but made by AVID, lol. (AVID is the "ProTools" for video and the "Hollywood Standard") Frame grabs will also depend on your FPS (frames per second) ratio, but you probably already know that part. I grab frames all the time, with little effort, or editing after. Fir the price of the program, $80-120, you cant beat it.

Thanks! Guess I'll save up for that.

If I thought I could get away with it, I'd throw you the video I took the other morning of the birds in my apple tree. There *should* be a frame where a bird flew across close to the window. I was going to post that individual picture in this thread, but with the stock Windows software, I can't grab that frame. There're a couple of other spots in the video where birds fly from one branch to another, too.

 

[Josh B]

restoring a single frame might be more of a headache in the long run then just doing a “rapid fire” mode (which most cameras support as well), that shoots say 5 images a second and stores them all in full resolution".

My previous camera(Kodak) had that, not sure about the present one(Fuji). Neither one a professional camera by any means but both decent hobby ones.
I stopped on a dirt road coming in through the country during a daytime thunderstorm, with a considerable number of lightning strikes, and started attempting to catch one on film, but it is near impossible.
Finally I started using the rapid fire and after a half dozen times of it rapidly snapping the shutter a great number of times I decided it was probably doing more damage to the shutter mechanism than anything.

I did finally learn in my quest to capture lightning to do it at night, using a tripod, and manual settings. I think the most I could get on that Kodak was 8 seconds, but still it greatly increases the chances of getting one.
Some of the better cameras I've seen would hold it open 30 seconds or more iirc. Those shots where there is a half dozen lightning bolts on a single frame were most likely done using that method, and the multiple strikes didn't really happen all together