"Video to still"

Yes you can. I've done it on several ocassions for some of my news/sports work. You only get the max pixels (1280x720 for the Olympus) available in the video format, but for newspaper work, the quality is quite acceptable. I used Movavi Video Converter, which is actually a pretty good program.

Here's a still taken of a catch for one of my cricket jobs (taken with the E-P1 and Nikon 300mm f4), which was published (reduced down to 800px wide here):



Cheers

Ray

 

You are always going to be limited to the size of the video frame. Full HD on the GH1 gives you 1920 x 1080 px which gives you just over 2MP. So a still will be limited to that size.

Also remember that the video may be shooting at 30fps so if you have movement in the frame, any still will show that.

I've taken stills off video and they are good enough for web use, but basically are about the same quality as a decent cameraphone.

You can of course just take a still on certain cameras whilst shooting video, but that obviously interrupts the video.

 

This is actually a tad incorrect. Even when the movie is 30fps, the shutter speed for every frame can be from 1/30 upwards, depending on the lighting conditions. So the brighter the light is, the sharper each individual image will be, if you have not specified otherwise in a camera with manual settings. Of course the are other things to consider, but this is the basic principle of motion images.

 

Obviously. If you optimise the settings and choose your lens with the idea of producing stills then you can eliminate some of the "motion blur" problems.

Shooting indoors or in low light however its difficult to do that, particularly with slower lenses or when more depth of field is required. Its important to point out that shooting video produces different results from stills.

I've often had occasions shooting weddings, where people say "Can I have a still image from this piece of video" Since the camera was set up to produce the optimum results for video, sometimes taking one of those frames and reproducing it as a still can be a disappointment.

 

True.

As a frequent user of the GF1's video properties, I have to say that it seems to put emphasis on sharp images. And thus it will produce quite noisy images in poor light conditions.

Unless you use the AE lock trick in shutter priority mode. Which can help in some situations to make less noisy, with more motion blur  

 

Just discovered this thread when googling 'stills from video'. Ray's cricket photo looks very impressive for an action frame grab and I'd love to know what settings were used to create it. Until recently, I have been taking frame grab stills from video using a Canon HV30 and Vegas Movie Studio. I sacrifice resolution and shallow DOF control in exchange for capturing 'the moment' for a portrait. Now I have bought a GH2 plus 14-140mm and 45mm lenses but haven't worked out the optimum 'frame-grab from video' settings yet. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Fiona Wyatt.