Newbie here with a unique task.........please recommend

[michaelongcj]

Hi,

I have no experience at serious video editing and would like to request some advice.

My task is very unique: I need something that can take the raw movie file and save the individual frames as jpegs or some sort of individual picture file. Other than that, I have no need to edit the video clip at all.

A check on google shows that most video editing software can capture 1 or 2 frames at a time, but in my case I'm talking about like an entire movie clip (x min x 60 sec x 30 fps) so this is definitely not doable on a large scale. The sequence of the frames are also very important here.

The movie file types in question are AVCHD (full HD), Motion JPEG and MP4 (both 640 x 480). The frame rate has been standardised at 30p. I know video files are convertible from one container to another and a little quality loss doesn't matter here, but hopefully I can bypass this complication.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get about this?

Thank you.

Michael

 

[DXNMedia]

simplest way is that if you can playback the files, just do a screen grab while video is paused using a media player.

Other than AVCHD, Quicktime Pro will enable you to extract frame accurate still pictures from most playable video files.

 

[alternus]

You can choose to export to bitmap or targa or tiff. Choose to export in "sequence" and you'll get 1 pic file per frame. But not every editing software has this capability.
I know Premiere Pro CS4 has it. Procoder can do it too.

 

[Pewpew]

alternus's recommendation is the standard workflow, suggest you go with it.

The keyword to look out for is Export and Image Sequence.

Adding on... FCP and AVID also have this function ( as with most edit packages nowadays )
Look for export>image sequence.
There would be a list of image formats in export settings you can export (FCP has a whole format list from your usual PNG, TARGA, Tiffs to Mac Paint, SGI )

The sequences exported are named "filename001.png, filename002.png..so on and so forth" thus addressing your concerns on frame sequential order.

if you are concerned about using commercial editors, you can try freewares VirtualDub or Avidemux, both which also can export image sequences. Not too sure if these two softwares support AVCHD import though.

 

[michaelongcj]

Thanks for all the advice. Will be testing it out and will report back to you all.