How to Capture Stills From Movie With Freeware

Individual frames found within video footage often make great still photographs.

Digital media provides a multitude of devices capable of preserving our most cherished memories in a variety of electronic formats. Many consumers use digital photo cameras or camcorders that capture still images and digital video, respectively. But what happens when the perfect picture exists in video form on your camcorder's tape or hard drive? Capturing instantaneous stills, or frames, from within a piece of footage is very important for later publishing or printing...and it's not that difficult.

Things You'll Need

• Computer

Instructions

1. Download the "EXE" file from an image capture freeware program such as ImageGrab to your computer's desktop. Run and install the file by right clicking and pressing "Run."

2. Locate and click the button with an open folder symbol on the far left side of the top toolbar. Browse for the appropriate file on your computer. Compatible file extensions often include AVI, MPEG, WMV, and DVD formats. Double click on the file you'd like to capture from to load it into the program.

3. Locate the video display screen. Make sure your video file has imported properly by reading and comparing the frame dimensions in the top left corner to the original file dimensions. Digital video footage is usually filmed in four by three dimension while high definition is 16 by nine.

4. Flip the video's image to the upright position if the program has inverted it during import. Click the "Invert" button, indicated by a vertical turquoise up and down arrow.

5. Click the "File Location" button in the top right corner, indicated by an arrow pointed toward the interior of an open folder. Set the location in which you'd like to store individual still images.

6. Navigate through the video footage using the right and left arrows on your computer. Use the right arrow to move forward and the left arrow to move backward in the footage's time. Every time you push either arrow, the navigation moves a single step, or still.

7. Press the "F12" key on your keyboard to capture a still from the footage and save it in the location you selected. Verify the image captured properly by checking the stills stored in the image folder.

Tips & Warnings

• Be careful and precise when choosing individual stills as some camcorders may produce blurry images during fast camera movement.

References

• Online Tech Tips: How to capture and extract still images from video

Resources

• Paul Gagla's fine contributions: Download ImageGrab