The moving images that we observe when watching videos and
movies are actually just an optical illusion of the human brain. At a speed of
about 30 frames per second, the movement caused by this stream of still
pictures becomes indistinguishable from the perceived movement of really moving
objects. That's why photography and cinematography have always been connected.
The tools needed to create moving images come from tools for creating still
images, they just are more powerful. These two technologies have always evolved
in tandem.
Take, for example, the 35 mm format, which has become the
standard because it matches the film format in traditional movie cameras.
Previously, the film industry used a 35mm camera and lens to check the lighting
and composition of the scene before shooting it with a more expensive film. For
many years, cameras were cameras for photos , and movie cameras were cameras
for movies, but now it is changing. Today's digital video formats have created
a new workflow.
How to Get a Quality Photo from a Video
This photo was taken from a culinary video, it can be easily
used for a cookbook or on social networks
Using a high-resolution video format such as 4K, and
accordingly a large amount of data received from each frame, you can now shoot
video and extract usable files from individual frames. 4K captures about
thirty-8 MB images per second, and the resulting images are good enough for
printing in magazines. This means that a photographer can take a 4K camera and
shoot a video, and then select individual frames to provide them as photos to
the client.
There are some drawbacks to this method — for example, the
cumbersome sequence of steps required to extract individual frames, but this
process opens up some amazing possibilities.
To use capturing photos from a video, sports photography
immediately comes to mind, where the subject moves quickly. You can shoot a
video of running athletes and choose the best image from a set of not 5-10
frames per second, but from a continuous stream of 30 frames per second.
It is also beneficial to use the capture of photos from the
video when shooting other objects, for example, at weddings. A common dilemma
for wedding photographers is the need to capture the couple’s emotional
gestures and looks during the ceremony without constantly clicking the camera
shutter. A wedding photographer can easily mount the camera on a tripod with a
long lens and capture the entire ceremony, later choosing the best shots.
About some restrictions
While a 4K video camera has a high-megapixel sensor, 4K video
does not use all the data from this sensor because it is cropped and reduced to
a standard 4K size. Each 4K frame is 8.8-megapixel and captures in a 17: 9
ratio.
Frames captured from 4K video will be wider and narrower
than full-frame frames. In order to maintain proportions, you have to crop the
image shot in 4K. Cropping a captured 4K frame results in an even lower final
number of pixels. The dynamic range of the video also decreases, which must be
taken into account when shooting.
5K video systems are now emerging, such as RED (Red Digital
Cinema), which are already shooting 6K videos to edit in 4K in post-production
video workflows. The point at which the video moves to 5K is the point at which
the photo and video frame become indistinguishable.
4K video requires a huge amount of memory . A 4K minute of
video takes up about 1 GB of disk space, and high-speed memory cards are needed
to prevent buffer overflows and prematurely stop video capture. This makes many
of the CompactFlash memory cards already in the bags of photographers useless
for 4K video.
Photographers will also need additional software to extract
images from 4K video - something like Apple's Final Cut Pro X or Adobe's
Premiere Pro. You can’t just import 4K video into Lightroom and select a frame,
but you can import it into Final Cut Pro X or Premiere Pro, select a frame and
export only this one 8 megapixel image.
To work with 4K video, you do not need to have a 4K monitor,
since the standard is automatically reduced to display correctly on HD
displays, so there is no need to invest in such equipment.
Capturing photo from video
Although the process for exporting photos from Premiere Pro
and Final Cut Pro X is slightly different, the idea remains the same. Our
example assumes that you are working with Final Cut Pro X, but in Premiere Pro
the steps are similar.
Final Cut Pro X requires a little tweaking to be able to
export the frame. In the "Settings" menu (press Command + comma),
select the "Destinations" tab and click "Add Destination" (Fig.
1). Click the "Save current frame" icon and select a format. TIFF and
Photoshop (PSD) are the highest resolution options, PNG and JPEG are also
available.
After capturing a 4K video, import it into the application
(Fig. 2). You will be prompted to add them to a new or existing event. If you
are just shooting frames, it doesn’t matter what event the video is added to,
but if you are working on a video project, it's nice to give it a suitable
name.
If you import simply to capture frames, there is no need to
include any special import functions such as color balancing or sound analysis.
Video clips are added on the left side of the standard Final
Cut Pro X interface and can be left here to capture frames (Fig. 3). To select
a photo, there is no need to create a new event or add a video to the event.
Just select a thumbnail of the video and it will appear in
the media player; it will have a yellow frame to indicate the selected clip.
Scroll through the thumbnail to select the exact frame, or,
for greater accuracy, use the left and right arrow keys to view the video frame
by frame. In this example, a video was taken of a bridge in Portland from a
moving boat to capture a frame where the sun creates a flash.
For even greater accuracy, you can add a clip to the event
and manually move the playhead. The last step is to share the photos by
clicking on the Share icon on the toolbar. Or export - select the destination
to export, and the selected frame will be saved.
You can also export the entire range of the selected video
as a series of frames. This is especially useful if you are trying to
illustrate something in sports such as snowboarding or skateboard to show stunt
athletes.
The future of photography
It is possible that in the near future, many photographers
working in the field of sports photography , wedding and news, will work
exclusively in video format, taking photos from a 4K, 5K or 6K camera. This is
becoming an increasingly convenient option for image acquisition, since it
eliminates some limitations in the speed of shooting even in the fastest
cameras.
In any case, for a modern photographer, the ability to
imperceptibly capture an object on video, and then extract an image suitable
for use, is a fairly convenient technique. It can help when traditional
photography is impractical or impossible.
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