Extracting Images From Movies

We now have access (or soon will) to nice (as in clean) moving pictures thanks to our Panasonic AVCHD camera. Now, we need to hack those images! What we want is a simple utility to extract the frames from our .MTS files. It is important to realize that the .MTS file is really just an MPEG4, therefore if you are having problems loading it, you might just try a new file extension. After reviewing several tools I have found one that works just as we need, FFMPEG. It is a cross platform, command line tool that can convert nearly any movie format to any other, including a simple frame dump (what we want). Much thanks to Jeffery Bowles (an Advanced Graphics 413 superstar) for a nice, short description of getting it going on a mac:

MTS files are just mpeg4 files. The command line utility ffmpeg will let you extract the frames:

Building:

svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure
make && make install

Example usage with an HD camera

ffmpeg -i 00000.MTS -s hd1080 -f image2 waa-%03d.png


Note: the %03d bit above means each successive frame should be numbered using 3 digits. That is, the first frame will be waa-001.png the next will be waa-002.png and so on, up to our last frame waa-999.png.