Photo Sharing: Video Stills

[MarkBarbieri]

The quality of video from video cameras, action cameras, and even cellphones keeps getting better and better. Most now shoot 4K video and some even shoot 8K. In comparison to megapixels, a standard HD camera creates a 2 megapixel image. With 4K, that goes up to 8 megapixels. That's plenty for most pictures.

Because of something called chroma subsampling, it isn't quite as good as that. Video cameras record brightness and color separately. In a typical image, they record the brightness for every pixel, but they only record one color for every group of four pixels. That isn't very noticeable in video, but it can be more noticeable in still images.

But not matter how much better still pictures can be than video images, there are times when you only have video and you want to create a still picture from it. I thought this might be a good place to share still images that you've taken from videos that you've shot.

I'll start first with a picture of my son hang gliding. The guide used a GoPro to record video of the flight. This was about 10 years ago, so it was only an HD GoPro. But I still love the picture I got from it.


Here I am on another flight.

 

[Pea-n-Me]

Great gliding pics!

These were all from video taken with iPhones. The first two are from 2017. The others are from this past year, but with older phone technology. I intentionally left the video stamps on them.














On occasion I have had to “steal“ some pics from video and I generally haven’t always been pleased, but it depends on the lighting and the movement. For instance, I take a lot of video of my dogs, and it’s often blurry. (Of course, these were taken at night in the snow with just a porch light on.)

 

[boBQuincy]

Here are two I would not have if it weren't for GoPro. First is a bike ride in the Guana (gtmnerr.org), a Florida wilderness. Next is Daytona, just getting ready to brake for the "bus stop" at about 140 while listening to Bob Dylan (actually could not hear anything but engine and rapid heartbeat at that point).