Shel B

Does anyone have experience extracting stills from videos? I recently took a decent video of the Big Boy locomotive...I'd like to extract some stills from it to make prints. Does the quality hold up to make say a 16x20 print?

JEANS

I've done it but the quality is not as good as from a still camera. Even so, it's better than nothing.

On the timeline, I cut just one frame, export it, then import it into Photoshop and go from there.

Jean

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Here's the skinny. If the video is 1080P, that's 1920x1080 pixels, or roughly 2MP. It will make an 8x4.5 inch print at 240 pixels per inch. Print larger, and you will see the pixels if you view the print up close.

If the video is 4K, that's 3840x2160 pixels, or nearly 8.3 MP. It will make a 16x9 inch print at 240 PPI. Print larger, and you will see the pixels if you view the print up close.

But here's the thing... Good video requires a relatively slow shutter speed to look smooth. At 30 frames per second, you should use 1/60 second shutter speed. That causes a slight amount of blurring of each frame, and the blur eases the transition from one frame to the next. It also makes stills taken from action video look blurry. At 24 (or 23.976) fps, the shutter speed should be 1/50 second, or the shutter angle should be 90 degrees (1/48 second) which provides even more blur.

You can USE higher shutter speeds for video to freeze action, but the playback can look choppy. To keep shutter speeds low, you will probably need a neutral density filter in bright daylight. I keep an ND 64 (6-stops of reduction) and an ND 8 (3-stops of reduction) in my bag.

What this means for extracting stills from video is that yes, it can be done, but the results may disappoint you.

Modbuilder

+1 on everything Burkphoto said. FWIW - I've found Lightroom to be surprisingly capable at extracting a photo from a video. WhoDaThunkIt!

CPR Loc: Nature Coast of Florida

I've run video in Photoshop and extracted a frame but it's not great. I can clean and sharpen a bit but still not like it was shot as a 24mb still image. I find that if I go ahead and apply the filters to the entire video and then extract a frame it woks a bit better.

art pear Loc: North Dakota

Will not print that big. A 5" x 7" would be pushing it.