Extracting stills from digital video

I have a Sony CyperShot DSC-W150 compact digital camera. I mostly use
it to take photos of the grandkids. One of the problems is that it
takes a couple of seconds between shots. If I don't time it just
right, I miss the best shot.

I have used the movie setting a few times. Some those short movie
clips have some great shots. Is there an easy way for me to extract a
single frame from the resulting mpg files?

I am more interested in something that is easy to use than free.

On 2009-12-05 19:55:42 -0500, Prof Wonmug said:

I have a Sony CyperShot DSC-W150 compact digital camera. I mostly use
it to take photos of the grandkids. One of the problems is that it
takes a couple of seconds between shots. If I don't time it just
right, I miss the best shot.

I have used the movie setting a few times. Some those short movie
clips have some great shots. Is there an easy way for me to extract a
single frame from the resulting mpg files?

I am more interested in something that is easy to use than free.

Well, all Macs come with iMovie. And on a Mac you generally edit your
movie in iMovie. And iMovie allows you to do just that, along with
about a gazillion other things. But then, that's a Mac and you don't
say what computer you have.
--
Michael

On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 23:35:31 -0500, Michael
wrote:

On 2009-12-05 19:55:42 -0500, Prof Wonmug said:

I have a Sony CyperShot DSC-W150 compact digital camera. I mostly use
it to take photos of the grandkids. One of the problems is that it
takes a couple of seconds between shots. If I don't time it just
right, I miss the best shot.

I have used the movie setting a few times. Some those short movie
clips have some great shots. Is there an easy way for me to extract a
single frame from the resulting mpg files?

I am more interested in something that is easy to use than free.

Well, all Macs come with iMovie. And on a Mac you generally edit your
movie in iMovie. And iMovie allows you to do just that, along with
about a gazillion other things. But then, that's a Mac and you don't
say what computer you have.

Sorry, I should have said that I have a PC (Windows XP).

Prof Wonmug wrote:

On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 23:35:31 -0500, Michael
wrote:

On 2009-12-05 19:55:42 -0500, Prof Wonmug said:

I have a Sony CyperShot DSC-W150 compact digital camera. I mostly use
it to take photos of the grandkids. One of the problems is that it
takes a couple of seconds between shots. If I don't time it just
right, I miss the best shot.

I have used the movie setting a few times. Some those short movie
clips have some great shots. Is there an easy way for me to extract a
single frame from the resulting mpg files?

I am more interested in something that is easy to use than free.

Well, all Macs come with iMovie. And on a Mac you generally edit your
movie in iMovie. And iMovie allows you to do just that, along with
about a gazillion other things. But then, that's a Mac and you don't
say what computer you have.

Sorry, I should have said that I have a PC (Windows XP).

There's a free (open source) program called Mplayer which is available
for many systems, including Windows. I've used an older Linux version
for converting video (.avi and .mpg) to a series of .jpg still images.
It's a very comprehensive and flexible program, so it might take some
extensive reading of the documentation to get it to do exactly what
you want.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html

On Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:04:11 -0800, Prof Wonmug wrote:

On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 23:35:31 -0500, Michael
wrote:

On 2009-12-05 19:55:42 -0500, Prof Wonmug said:

I have a Sony CyperShot DSC-W150 compact digital camera. I mostly use
it to take photos of the grandkids. One of the problems is that it
takes a couple of seconds between shots. If I don't time it just
right, I miss the best shot.

I have used the movie setting a few times. Some those short movie
clips have some great shots. Is there an easy way for me to extract a
single frame from the resulting mpg files?

I am more interested in something that is easy to use than free.

Well, all Macs come with iMovie. And on a Mac you generally edit your
movie in iMovie. And iMovie allows you to do just that, along with
about a gazillion other things. But then, that's a Mac and you don't
say what computer you have.

Sorry, I should have said that I have a PC (Windows XP).

Windows Movie Player will do that for you, you probably already have
it included with your XP package, try it.