Taking stills from a video??

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Taking stills from a video??

Postby sahara » Sat Jan 07, 2006 12:07 pm

Anyone know if its possible to take still photo from a video, apart from taking a picture off the tv screen.
Someone said theres way off linking camcorder to pc,
Help, am bamboozled!!!!
:?: :?: :?:
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Postby ChrisA » Sat Jan 07, 2006 12:36 pm

Should be pretty simple! Firstly, assuming you have a camcorder? What's the make/model?
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Postby GarySutherland » Mon Jan 09, 2006 9:09 am

Hi Sarah,

Yes, it's quite straightforward if you've got the right kit. I can do camcorder-to-PC, VHS-to-PC, and PC to video or DVD.

You can get problems with the image quality though due to the way the picture is interlaced and this is more pronounced if you've used the LongPlay setting when you recorded it.

Regards
Gary
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Postby sahara » Mon Jan 09, 2006 10:04 am

ok, its a sony camcorder i think and dell pc, wot sort of kit do i need then?? :?:
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Postby GarySutherland » Mon Jan 09, 2006 11:55 pm

Check your PC to see if you have Windows Movie Maker on it anywhere. You probably will have if it's running Windows XP. You can use this to transfer the video to the PC, and then extract individual frames as images.

Connecting the camcorder to the PC is sometimes tricky. If it has a DV socket (digital video) and your PC has a FireWire (IEEE1394) port then you can connect them together with a special cable.

If either the camcorder or the PC doesn't have a DV/FireWire socket then you'll need to buy a bit of kit called a A/V Converter. One end of this plugs into one of the PC's USB sockets and the other end plugs into the camera's S-Video or Composite video outputs.

The A/V Converter I have is made by Philips and came with a new DVD-RW drive but I'm you can buy them separately. Something like this or this.

They're usually sold under the premise of transferring your old video tapes onto DVD.

Cheers
Gary
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Postby sahara » Tue Jan 10, 2006 9:05 am

yep, have windows movie maker, cheers gary, will buy one of them cables and get sorted out, thanks again :P
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Postby Wired 2 The Moon » Mon May 22, 2006 11:51 pm

why dont ye just take a screenshot of it??

Ctrl + Prnt Scr

its really simple then all you have to do is paste it into a imaging program
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Postby Stone Cold aka Doags Bs » Tue May 23, 2006 1:11 pm

Wired 2 The Moon wrote:why dont ye just take a screenshot of it??

Ctrl + Prnt Scr

its really simple then all you have to do is paste it into a imaging program

this doesnt work for videos
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Guide to taking screenshots

Postby Stone Cold aka Doags Bs » Tue May 23, 2006 1:13 pm

Thought this deserved another post, it's from another forum.

This is a guide on how to easily create and add great looking screenshots to your upload.

The 2 things you need are:

1. ImageGrabberII - A brilliant program!


Code: Select all
http://www45.brinkster.com/antworkz


2. A free image host - Stickied.net is probably the best at the moment.


Code: Select all
http://www.stickied.net/



1. Creating screenshots

To get started open up your movie in ImageGrabber (supports wmv aswell) and the movie will start playing. Click the red stop button and the movie is open and ready to go.

Click this button
Imageand the following dialog box will appear

Image


Enter the number of screens shots you would like to take of the scene. A good number for a scene is probably about 10-15 and you can have a play around with this and the number of columns explained in the settings below to see what you like.

When you click OK it will go through the movie taking the screen shots and add them to the timeline across the bottom.

You can add individual selected screenshots by using the scrollbar to move to the picture you want and clicking this button to add the current image at the end of the timeline.

Once you have all the pics you want you can arrange the screenshots in the timeline.


* Right click a screenshot to delete it, delete all or change the text label.

* Left click a screenshot to drag it to where you want in the timeline.


ImageGrabber settings

Once you have all the screens you want, on the File menu click Save File and you will see the following default settings dialog box ...

Image

Layout: Good idea to make the dimensions of each screen (Tile) a fraction of the original to avoid distortion.

Style: Details of the drop shadow around your screens and the background color for your image.

Info: You can include the time each sample was taken in the vid.

JPEG: You can adjust the quality down to reduce the file size say for a full movie with many screens.

Details: You can include the basic movie statistics in the image.

There are plenty of possible configurations, try playing around with different settings until you find a layout you like.


Click the save button and using the Default settings will produce an image with a layout similar to this ...


Image

Once you have your image you may want to resize it or modify it in some way, a nice free and easy to use image viewing/editing tool is irfanview -
Code: Select all
http://www.irfanview.com/


Now you have your screenshots, the next step is hosting your cool new image.

2. Hosting screenshots

The are a few free image hosting web sites around and most of them operate the same way. The best 1 at the moment is:

Code: Select all
http://www.stickied.net/



Thats the tutorial, enjoy this big edit by me, hope you like it :)

Hope it helps
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Postby Christian » Wed Sep 13, 2006 8:48 am

Stone Cold aka Doags Bs wrote:
Wired 2 The Moon wrote:why dont ye just take a screenshot of it??

Ctrl + Prnt Scr

its really simple then all you have to do is paste it into a imaging program

this doesnt work for videos


Does work, just download it, or buy/get the DVD.
~The Flying Dutchman~
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