Frame-by-Frame viewing software

[kdewalt]

My apologies if this newbie question is answered elsewhere. I spent a few hours searching and could not find an answer, probably because this is very new to me that I don't even know which questions to ask.

I have a new Sony DCR-HC26 camcorder. I want to download videos of my golf swing to my Windows XP machine and look at them frame-by-frame and count frames over the 1 - 1.5 seconds of the swing. It records at 30 FPS and I need to look at all 30-45 frames over this time period.

I have used Windows Movie Maker 2.1 to download the files into WMV and view them; unfortunately WMM only allows me to advance at .06-.07 secs at a time - equivalent to about 2 frames.

I am looking for free software that allows me to download the videos and view them in this manner. Other video editing functionality is nice-to-have but not necessary.

I also tried using Zoom after reading some posts in the forum; it works fine for playing back video but unfortunately I have not found a way to advance the WMV file I created frame-by-frame. I suspect that I cannot do this with a WMV file at all.

Thanks advance for your time and my apologies again if this question is answered elsewhere.

[gadgetguy]

WinDV to Capsfer to DV-AVI.
VirtualDub to view frame by frame.

[kdewalt]

Thanks. Am I to assume that WMV does not allow frame-by-frame?

[guns1inger]

You can output from Movie Maker to DV avi, and then view frame by frame in virtualdub.

[jagabo]

Another problem you'll encounter is that the video from your camcorder is interlaced. Each frame contains half (every other scanline) of two pictures taken at 1/60 second intervals. You will see comb artifacts with VirtualDub.

A better solution is to use VirtualDub along with a simple AVISynth script with a BOB deinterlace:

AVISource("file.avi")
BOB()

That will split the two fields from each frame into two full images, turning your 30 frame per second video into 60 frames per second.

First you should capture as DV AVI (essentially a copy of the digital video on the tape) with WMM or any other DV capture program. You might find WinDV or DVIO easy to use for that.

[kdewalt]

Thank you very much everyone. The information was incredibly helpful. I spent some time reading posts here and on Doom9 today and am starting to understand how to use this software.

Another quick question I was unable to answer after a few hours of searching:

I'm looking for the ability to export a set of AVI frames. For example, my golf swing takes about 28-40 frames. I would like to instantly export all frames as 28-40 individual image (jpeg, GIF, whatever) files. Is it possible to do this with VirtualDub?

I found the ability to "copy source frame to clipboard" to do each individually but I would like to export all of them at once.

Thanks again...

[jagabo]

VirtualDub can export frames as images:

Use the mark-in and mark-out tools to mark the starting and ending frames, then use File -> Save Image Sequence.