Best (Free) Program for Extracting Stills from Video

[krukster86]

Hey all,

This community has been really helpful in developing my shooting skills with the GoPro. The wife and I are putting together a "SCUBA Wall" of pictures from our dive trips. In the past I extracted video stills from GoPro Hero 2 footage in this laborious process:

1. Play footage in Quicktime and fullscreen it.
2. Pause at a "money shot" scene
3. Find the best frame (greatest detail, least pixellation) by going through it, frame by frame
4. Print Screen into MS Paint.
5. Save a .jpg
6. Edit the .jpg in LightRoom

Is there a better (free) alternative? The one thing that is a MUST for me is the ability to go frame by frame in a video to find the best looking "image" to take a screenshot of.

 

[diversteve]

For free:

GoPro Studio Edit Software

Export video still frames at full resolution

Any $50 NLE does also. I've heard Pinnacle Studio works well with GoPro .mp4 format files but I don't own one.

 

[krukster86]

Interesting, I never really played around the Studio software enough to see an "export still" feature. I will check it out tonight!

 

[MrChen]

VLC has a screen capture item in the menus.

VideoLAN - VLC: Official site - Free multimedia solutions for all OS!

 

[diversteve]

Studio software enough to see an "export still" feature.

THE FRAME GRABBER
The Frame Grabber can capture a single frame from
any video clip in your current project. The grabbed
frame can be added directly to your movie or saved out
to disk in any of a number of standard graphics
formats.
Once you have saved a grabbed frame to disk, you can:
· Use it in other software applications.
· Manipulate it in image-editing software.
· Import it back into your movies as a still image via
the Album or one of the title editors.

The Frame grabber tool
Use the Frame grabber tool in conjunction with
the Player. To access it, open the Toolbox and
click the Frame grabber button.
Scrub or play through your movie or source video until
the frame you want is displayed in the Player, then
click the Grab button. The grabbed frame appears in
the tool’s preview area, ready to be added to your
movie or saved as a file on disk.
Reduce flicker: If the source video of the frame grab
contains a large amount of motion, the grabbed frame
may show flickering, which can be reduced or
eliminated by checking the Reduce flicker option.

If it has the option save it as a .tif. Or convert your .jpg to a .tif before editing. The nature of lossy compression used in the .jpg format means every time you save it after further processing it gets marginally worse. For printing that may make a difference. (old photoshop trick)

 

[emoreira]

VLC has a screen capture item in the menus.

VideoLAN - VLC: Official site - Free multimedia solutions for all OS!

+1 for VLC.