How do I export photos from video at a set time interval.

April 14, 2010 12:54 PM

I have an hour long video (at .avi format) that I want to sample at 5 second intervals. Is there a software with such functionality that can automatically export a picture of the video at certain time intervals?
posted by typography to Technology (5 answers total)

Well, QuickTime Pro has this feature, but it's not free and I don't know if it will open your avi. You can at least find out with the free QuickTime.

(avi is just a "container" format - it can contain many different types of video and without more information we can only guess about what is inside yours.)

If it works, and you have (or get) QuickTime Pro, then the function you're looking for is in File -> Export, and then choose "Movie to Image Sequence".
posted by Mwongozi at 12:58 PM on April 14, 2010

Best answer: Looks like ffmpeg can do it.

"You can extract images from a video, or create a video from many images:

For extracting images from a video:

ffmpeg -i foo.avi -r 1 -s WxH -f image2 foo-%03d.jpeg
This will extract one video frame per second from the video and will output them in files named `foo-001.jpeg', `foo-002.jpeg', etc. Images will be rescaled to fit the new WxH values."
posted by jingzuo at 1:00 PM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

It won't give you discrete images but media player classic can spit out contact sheets for you.
posted by porpoise at 2:05 PM on April 14, 2010

It appears you can do this with AVISynth, using the "SelectEvery" or "SelectRangeEvery" filters. Then you take your AVISynth script and run it through VirtualDub to output the frames in an appropriate format.
posted by neckro23 at 2:11 PM on April 14, 2010

How about Thumber? I haven't used it and it looks like it may only do one-second intervals but maybe you can put it to use?
posted by eatcake at 6:08 PM on April 14, 2010