Are stills extracted from video the future?

Mahoneyd187

Mahoneyd187

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As per the title :)

I thought it might make an interesting discussion for a photography forum.

Personally I think....possibly yes....theres some amazing video/cine work being directed by photographers at the moment.

What prompted my thoughts - watching footage directed for Guess by my favourite photographer Vincent Peters, not a moment went past where I didn't feel an amazing still could be extracted from the scene :cool:
 
As both a video and stills guy, I've always felt that the holy grail and the aim for any cinematographer should be that every single frame should be a beautiful photo in its own right.

With the advent of higher and higher resolution cameras, eg the red epic, which shoots at 5x hd, this poses a threat for some photography - why get a photographer when you can just pull a frame out of the ultra high res video camera that is shooting at 96fps?

Even some news images now are being frame grabs from video as they can all shoot 1080p, which is fine for web stills use...

Vincent laforet nailed it in an interview on the aphotoeditor blog a couple of weeks back...

'Us video guys want to take your stills jobs, just like you stills guys want to take our video jobs'.

Poignant quote that's going to really resonante through the industry in the coming years I think. (Not that the photo is dead, it never will be, even if everyone does read the news and magazines on their iPad)
 
Great points Dave, I agree totally, though from a totally uneducated point of view with regards to video. Even I can see that it's crazy in this day and age not to expand your skill set to cover the ever expanding media
 
Going to show my ignorance here so please excuse the simplistic mind at work - I'm sure someone will put me right!

Currently in the UK (and Europe?) normal frame rate is 25 fps. Doesn't matter if it's standard definition or high definition - it's still 25 fps.

To get smooth motion, when something is moving reasonably quickly, each frame image is in fact slightly blurred but we don't see this when we watch films - we just see the motion. If the images were pin sharp the motion would look slightly jerky - bit like stop motion speeded up.

Now, weddings and the like are usually fairly slow motion affairs (probably except for the groom making a hasty exit!) so I can see the opportunity for 'convergence' (is that the buzzword?) working here, but in other respects won't the industry need to change frame rates, or has it done so already? :shrug:

Just curious!

Andy
 
itsdavedotnet said:
As both a video and stills guy, I've always felt that the holy grail and the aim for any cinematographer should be that every single frame should be a beautiful photo in its own right.

With the advent of higher and higher resolution cameras, eg the red epic, which shoots at 5x hd, this poses a threat for some photography - why get a photographer when you can just pull a frame out of the ultra high res video camera that is shooting at 96fps?
Even some news images now are being frame grabs from video as they can all shoot 1080p, which is fine for web stills use...

Vincent laforet nailed it in an interview on the aphotoeditor blog a couple of weeks back...

'Us video guys want to take your stills jobs, just like you stills guys want to take our video jobs'.

Poignant quote that's going to really resonante through the industry in the coming years I think. (Not that the photo is dead, it never will be, even if everyone does read the news and magazines on their iPad)
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It depends. In bright conditions, and for certain types of things, eg sports, you still shoot with a high shutter speed on your video camera, in exactly the same way that you would with stills, but still at 25fps. The Sony Z1's default shutter speed is 1/60th if I remember right, so still enough to get a sharp still image in many situations. The blur doesn't matter too much as our eyes keep up anyway at 25 fps.

As for what frame rate stuff is actually shot at, especially if they're going to want to be slowing the footage down, with new digital cinema cameras, the option to shoot a LOT faster is there, eg 96fps with the EPIC or crazy, crazy speeds with the phantom.
 
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With most newer dslr camera's able to shoot at 60fps, pulling a still out that is not just usable but is fully editable as a psd file is going to become the norm. Software is now geared towards this and even cheaper hd camera's like the go pro can produce great stills from video, I recently shot a short kiteboarding video and was able to extract the cover artwork from the captured footage. this saves me endless photoshop work designing an attention grabbing screen shot when uploaded to vimeo etc.


Kinn Pro Rider Team. by loop da loop, on Flickr
 
I have to agree with Dave, I too saw an article by Vincent Laforet bestowing the virtues of a RED, and can see screen grabs become very important in the future and more so a prices come down and technology goes up. $50K for a body only Red Epic is still out of most individual togs price range
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but £300-£500 a day is still what a lot of photographers pay for their camera rental, and is about the same as the day rate for an epic will be.
 
Grizu said:
With most newer dslr camera's able to shoot at 60fps, pulling a still out that is not just usable but is fully editable as a psd file is going to become the norm.
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It doesn't matter if you save the file as a jpeg or psd, it's still from the same source video file and so will be the same quality until you edit it. Also at 60fps you are getting a 720p image ie 1280x720, fine for web use but a bit small for printing on a DVD cover, I would at least try to use a 1920x1080 still is available.

Its not a new idea though as this article from 2009 shows.
 
Just to throw a dampner on the excitement.... I've spent many years producing moving images, and very very rarely does a single frame grab look anything like as good as a proper stills photograph, however good the moving version looked.

They really are different beasties... What works well in a moving multi-camera sequence doesn't look so hot when you freeze it, and what looks great from one prefect perspective looks rubbish in reverse.

Hit pause at random on your sky plus box right now in the middle of your favourite show or the news, and really stare at the image from a photographic perspective if you don't believe me!

Forget the technicalities of resolution and so on (...i know that can be hard on here...), there's a very good reason why every single feature film has a unit photographer, and its not for "behind the scenes" shots, that's just value-added stuff, its for the posters and magazine stills, because their shots are more suited for that medium.
 
flossie said:
Just to throw a dampner on the excitement.... I've spent many years producing moving images, and very very rarely does a single frame grab look anything like as good as a proper stills photograph, however good the moving version looked.

They really are different beasties... What works well in a moving multi-camera sequence doesn't look so hot when you freeze it, and what looks great from one prefect perspective looks rubbish in reverse.

Hit pause at random on your sky plus box right now in the middle of your favourite show or the news, and really stare at the image from a photographic perspective if you don't believe me!

Forget the technicalities of resolution and so on (...i know that can be hard on here...), there's a very good reason why every single feature film has a unit photographer, and its not for "behind the scenes" shots, that's just value-added stuff, its for the posters and magazine stills, because their shots are more suited for that medium.
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The technicalities didn't enter into my mind at all when starting this thread, it was actually watching video clips created by fashion photographers for designer's/label lookbooks and campaigns. As in directed entirely by the photographer in question. And there are several examples I've seen where images could have been extracted from almost every scene and would have made wonderful still photographs....should the technical side of things make it a possiblity of course :cool:
 
An example...this is from a 2 year old campaign...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2SIRdlrXQQ

There are definately a lot of opportunities to extract stills from this sequence that would easily challenge an outright still photograph.

I'm not talking about a still from the news....who wants a photo of a news reader anyway?

If you can video a model for 30mins and extract any still frame you want, at any point, and not miss any expression, any fantastic lighting when you've moved a light from A to B and not noticed whats going on in between and so on....then why bother taking stills at all? I'm purely speculating of course....I've never filmed anything in my whole life...

But imagine, sporting events, with player-cam being what it is...with tech evolving surely we'll just be taking stills from footage thats being recorded anyway? Who needs a photographer at a football match when there's X amount of videographers covering every single players, every move...?
 
Mahoneyd187 said:
An example...this is from a 2 year old campaign...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2SIRdlrXQQ

There are definately a lot of opportunities to extract stills from this sequence that would easily challenge an outright still photograph.
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yes, I agree (not every frame though!) but that's basically a sequence of animated stills, rather than stills from a film. (pause and think about that for a moment). The difference may seems subtle, but its why film and photography have coexisted for the past hundred years, even though the technology has always been there to take stills from moving images.

You don't need to look at recent work to illustrate your point - have a look at pretty much any of Stanley Kubrick's work for older examples - again, you could take stills from much any of his work, yet he always had a unit photographer with him. (interestingly, as with much of his work, there is a certain mystery as to which photos he took himself).

I'm not talking about a still from the news....who wants a photo of a news reader anyway?
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The corridor outside any news studio is stuffed full of them :lol: :gag: (none of which are off-air grabs, either!).

If you can video a model for 30mins and extract any still frame you want, at any point, and not miss any expression, any fantastic lighting when you've moved a light from A to B and not noticed whats going on in between and so on....then why bother taking stills at all? I'm purely speculating of course....I've never filmed anything in my whole life...
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If you've not noticed what happens when you move that light from A to B and missed the magic moment in between, you have more important things to worry about! That's an essential part of the process of filming things, you see how things evolve and respond on camera, whether you are recording or not, and is why you keep fiddling with the lights, the camera position, the position of the talent, etc...

The stills photographer slips in, spots the moment, frames the shot, and is gone again. They may have been in the same position as the moving camera, but they almost certainly didn't have an equivalent lens & aperature, and they used their photographer's eye to capture the moment. If you relied on just your primary recordings of the day, you might never have caught that moment...

But imagine, sporting events, with player-cam being what it is...with tech evolving surely we'll just be taking stills from footage thats being recorded anyway? Who needs a photographer at a football match when there's X amount of videographers covering every single players, every move...?
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The people that particular technology is pitched at are just not interested in still images, simple as that. Attention-defecit generation etc etc.

The photographers at a football match are there for the readers of newspapers who are looking for a single image to sum up the match in their minds. They also get perspectives that a player cam simply can't (e.g. the classic reverse of the goal-keeper just failing to stop the ball with his finger tips...) - ok you could completly automate this, but its cheaper for a newspaper to send a photographer with a few remote control cameras! Plus you also don't then get into the very expensive and complicated issues of buying rights from each other...

Also there's simple things like frame rates - even a (hugely expensive) super-slomo camera gives you a mere 1/100th of a second for those magic moments of sweat-droplets frozen in mid-air and is highly unlikely to be in the right angle, as usually used for high wides, for penalty disputes etc - boxing is one of the few sports where slomo is in the right place for close-ups.
 
whiteflyer said:
I see nothing wrong with this frame grab at all when viewed at full size.

http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/wp-content/uploads/CloseupFinal.jpg
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I can see lots wrong with it at standard size though...
Don't like the stuff round the child's mouth. Needs photoshopping out.
Flat, two-dimensional image.
Only one eye is in focus.
Background is...meh...

etc etc etc

(that probably wasn't your point though :lol:)

Mine might be though - RED are very, very, good at marketing using new media aimed towards semi pros... Treat everything with a pinch of salt.
 
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itsdavedotnet said:
As both a video and stills guy, I've always felt that the holy grail and the aim for any cinematographer should be that every single frame should be a beautiful photo in its own right.

With the advent of higher and higher resolution cameras, eg the red epic, which shoots at 5x hd, this poses a threat for some photography - why get a photographer when you can just pull a frame out of the ultra high res video camera that is shooting at 96fps?

Even some news images now are being frame grabs from video as they can all shoot 1080p, which is fine for web stills use...

Vincent laforet nailed it in an interview on the aphotoeditor blog a couple of weeks back...

'Us video guys want to take your stills jobs, just like you stills guys want to take our video jobs'.

Poignant quote that's going to really resonante through the industry in the coming years I think. (Not that the photo is dead, it never will be, even if everyone does read the news and magazines on their iPad)
Click to expand...

A very valid point from a News point of view when you consider that videography is now a standard part of the NCTJ syllabus for Press Photographers and Photojournalists at NCE level, and represents one of the core exams. Each candidate has to produce a 60-90 second clip suitable for broadcast, including audio.
 
flossie said:
If you've not noticed what happens when you move that light from A to B and missed the magic moment in between, you have more important things to worry about! That's an essential part of the process of filming things, you see how things evolve and respond on camera, whether you are recording or not, and is why you keep fiddling with the lights, the camera position, the position of the talent, etc...
.
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There's always one....:bang:

Let's not get into a "mine's bigger than yours type debate". We're all only human, opportunities will always be missed, even by the very best :thumbs:
 
DemiLion said:
A very valid point from a News point of view when you consider that videography is now a standard part of the NCTJ syllabus for Press Photographers and Photojournalists at NCE level, and represents one of the core exams. Each candidate has to produce a 60-90 second clip suitable for broadcast, including audio.
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Well for News location work they got rid of electricians years ago, have almost completly eliminated noise boys, uplinks are becoming increasingly de-skilled and not requiring an engineer in many cases, and journos are lucky if they've got a 22 year old "producer" who can drive them there. But hey, its cheap, and never mind the quality, it looks more "authentic". Never mind, the seperate cameramen will be next as self-shooting journos is a growing trend - a talking head on location spouting inane babble is all that is required, cheaper the better just so long as its "breaking, on the spot, reporting".


Anyway, back to the original point!

Yes, one camera can shoot everything.
Just as one person can :

  • Produce
  • Direct
  • Film (from all angles wide high 2-shot MCU head-shot reverse etc)
  • Photograph
  • AD
  • 2AD
  • MakeUp
  • Light
  • Sound
  • Continuity
  • Art
  • Props
  • Script
  • Run
  • Drive
  • Edit
  • Grade
  • Graphics
  • ...apologies to any Crafts I've missed out...
The funny thing is - as you get a bigger budget and standards go up, instead of one person spending longer and longer making a finely-crafted and perfect piece of art with a single piece of kit, in fact people and equipment gets more and more specalised.

A shopping channel can be run by a couple of people in the gallery and 1 or 2 cameramen, sports pundits sitting in a room with a view have 3-4 cameras and a team of about 6-12, and a big LE show is 6-20 cameras and vast numbers of production staff. Notice how the bigger and more complex it gets, the more people are involved...

In film world, if you've got (lets say) Tom Hanks on set for one day, you need to ensure every single second isn't wasted and every angle is covered, so everything is compartmentalised and there's a huge amount of thumb-twiddling and apparent waste - but when people are needed or something goes wrong or there's a turn-around, it happens very quickly. If one person or one camera was doing everything - as would happen at the semi-pro level, there simply isn't the resources to achieve that - and as well, crucially, to spot the little tiny mistakes in their area that could ruin an entire day's work or mean expensive frame-by-frame post-production work.

Its extremely easy to tunnel-vision, which if you are a painter working on the Sistene Chapel roof for 20 years that's fine, but if you've got 15 minutes to capture the perfect moment, no good at all...


Taking another tack, looking at the original thought - its great to have your super-res-frame-rate-uber-camera you can take stills from. But if that camera is on a dolly doing a close-up for the perfect moment of acting, its not going to give you any other shots...


Anyway, I've waffled enough of this, but hopefully its been interesting to some people :cool:
 
flossie said:
Well for News location work they got rid of electricians years ago, have almost completly eliminated noise boys, uplinks are becoming increasingly de-skilled and not requiring an engineer in many cases, and journos are lucky if they've got a 22 year old "producer" who can drive them there. But hey, its cheap, and never mind the quality, it looks more "authentic". Never mind, the seperate cameramen will be next as self-shooting journos is a growing trend - a talking head on location spouting inane babble is all that is required, cheaper the better just so long as its "breaking, on the spot, reporting".
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I don't suppose you fancy ramming it do you?

This is meant to be a tech discussion, not a sob about how big your ego is.

I suggest that you have a look at the quality of work produced by those who have passed their NCE's before spouting off.
 
DemiLion said:
I don't suppose you fancy ramming it do you?

This is meant to be a tech discussion, not a sob about how big your ego is.

I suggest that you have a look at the quality of work produced by those who have passed their NCE's before spouting off.
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Eh? I didn't mention my ego...that was a comment about how television news has and is going from a technical perspective, driven by relentless editorial and financial pressures - where technical corners are the first things to be cut! Its all about reducing costs, and the biggest cost is people, not equipment - if you can get a team down from 3 people to 1, that's a huge saving, and can mean the difference between getting a report in or not bothering - whether its outside some rural court or afganistan - and the priority is getting as many live reports in as quickly as possible, preferably before anyone else, as that's what drives viewers.
 
This is meant to be a tech discussion, not a sob about how big your ego is.
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I think it was meant to /not/ be a tech discussion tbh, and I apologise for in part making it one!

I don't think that the photograph or photography will ever go away, no matter what people say about people only reading magazines on ipads or whatever - and no, the unit and advertising photography for feature films will never just be frame grabs - but there's always going to be a big middle ground there - one example, some TV shows on the BBC for the iplayer holding image are already using just frame grabs, even for some high end shows, whereas channel 4 for 4od mostly does produce a separate (and usually very good) still photo, which they also use for print advertising as well.

Another example, the very first photos to hit the news sites of the royal wedding kiss WEREN'T the photos from the agencies taken by the likes of Leon Neal - they were frame grabs from the BBC feed for a good quarter of an hour or so until the agencies caught up and the images hit the wire and were put online.

But what about, say, local court stuff? You've got some murderer going into a court somewhere, a news agency wants to shoot both stills and video to syndicate to the networks - any photos are never going to be art, it's a bloke walking into a building - why not just take a 1080p frame grab instead of sending a stills guy as well as video? Smaller press scrum and one less flash going off too, so the video will be better. I could easily see that logic and financials being really appealing to agencies in the really very near future, if it's not happening already.
 
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DemiLion said:
I don't suppose you fancy ramming it do you?

This is meant to be a tech discussion, not a sob about how big your ego is.

I suggest that you have a look at the quality of work produced by those who have passed their NCE's before spouting off.
Click to expand...


Mark, sometimes you are better off not typing it at all. Can we keep it in the grounds of civility please.

Thanks. :)
 
Partly most of it depends on the shutter angle of the camera, when a standard 180 degree shutter angle is used, at 24 fps the sensor/film will be exposed for 1/48th of a second per frame, which is not going to freeze action particularly well if you pluck a single frame out, especially during fast scenes. Shooting at 48 fps still only increases that to 1/96th of a second which in still photography terms is still not particularly good and will exhibit blur. Shooting at 60 fps still only increases it to 1/120th of a second.

Douglas Trumball (co-designer/creator with Stanley Krubrick of the majority of the special effects in 2001: A Space Odessey and director of the film Silent Running as well as special effects on many other famous films) did research into shooting at higher frame rates and he found that with the same footage shot and projected at different frame rates, the emotional reaction of viewers increased up to 72 fps and then stayed the same. So if you take the research literally, although shooting at hugh frame rates past 60 fps may make it easier to just use frames as still images, the production costs would increase tremendously and would make it a very expensive way of doing it for not very much benefit.

O.K so you could just decrease the shutter angle so the film/sensor is exposed for less time which would give still images with less blur, but then you get other problems with footage looking too smooth as theres so little motion blur and it would make some special filming techniques difficult to do.

Plus, what do you think the unit photographer is there for? To take still pictures!!!
 
flossie said:
Eh? I didn't mention my ego...that was a comment about how television news has and is going from a technical perspective, driven by relentless editorial and financial pressures - where technical corners are the first things to be cut! Its all about reducing costs, and the biggest cost is people, not equipment - if you can get a team down from 3 people to 1, that's a huge saving, and can mean the difference between getting a report in or not bothering - whether its outside some rural court or afganistan - and the priority is getting as many live reports in as quickly as possible, preferably before anyone else, as that's what drives viewers.
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Yup I misread your comments as being a dig at the standard of work produced by press still photographers, as opposed to a general comment about staff reduction etc.

Sorry about that - shouldn't log on before the first coffee of the day!
 
DemiLion said:
Sorry about that - shouldn't log on before the first coffee of the day!
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that's ok, sorry too, i was being a bit ranty as well - i think i shouldn't post after coffee! :hug2:

p.s.
who put this in....
:yv:
 
You do realise that she takes those deadly seriously, don't you?
 
whiteflyer said:
$50K for a body only Red Epic ...
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Even $50,000 is relatively cheap for a serious camera. Sony's F35 is nearly four times the price (£120,000-ish) and their brand new F65 (with the 8K sensor) is likely to be even more.
 
itsdavedotnet said:
But what about, say, local court stuff? You've got some murderer going into a court somewhere, a news agency wants to shoot both stills and video to syndicate to the networks - any photos are never going to be art, it's a bloke walking into a building - why not just take a 1080p frame grab instead of sending a stills guy as well as video? Smaller press scrum and one less flash going off too, so the video will be better. I could easily see that logic and financials being really appealing to agencies in the really very near future, if it's not happening already.
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Apart from the fact you are going to shoot the still upright , square landscape, left and right adjusted and the video just landscape, also video is inherently not sharp, in fact sharp video looks crap, almost as crap as soft pictures

The other big issue is trying to wire the video back is a royal balls ache.
 
zilly said:
Apart from the fact you are going to shoot the still upright , square landscape, left and right adjusted and the video just landscape, also video is inherently not sharp, in fact sharp video looks crap, almost as crap as soft pictures

The other big issue is trying to wire the video back is a royal balls ache.
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I'm not sure if anyone saw my post on the previous page but thats essentially what I was saying to cut a long explanation short.
 
Does your video camera shoot H.264, MPEG or other video format that has a key frame with interpolated ones making up the frames in between? If so, you want to frame grab a key frame for best results on your stills.
 
The problem is that until D-SLRs or video cameras all shoot at 1000fps and above as standard, the only stills worth using are going to be nice stationary objects. Currently most people shoot at around 50th/sec to get smooth video. Shoot faster and you get the "hyper-real" effect of the beach scene in "Shaving Ryan's Privates" etc. Now if you try taking a still from Wimbledon that was shot at 50th, you'll be left with a very swoopy racquet arm and a yellow smear where the ball used to be.

As cameras head towards the higher frame rates then, yes, it will become possible but the next question will come up; in time critical situations, who's going to wade through 15 minutes of video at 1000fps, looking for the perfect moment?

I don't doubt that the future will involve cross-over but no-one can predict how it will work out. The Times were the first paper to use the now-common system of shooting live a few years ago, while covering the Wimbledon final. Afterwards, in their back-patting article in the paper, they said it was great but they wouldn't use it again for some time as the sheer extra amount of work that was placed on the picture desk to wade through every single frame that the photographer shot bogged everything down. Employers don't just pay photographers for the pressing of the release button. They also pay for the photographer's ability to recognise the moment, pick the right frame, edit it correctly and push it through with speed. The question for the industry is who will produce the equipment at an affordable price first, then who will work out how to use it properly.
 
PS itsdavedotnet's comment on the previous page about the wedding is a prime example of my point; two people stood nice and still filled a gap temporarily until our pictures dropped through onto the wire. Currently an emergency stop-gap until the real stuff arrives... ;)
 
Just come across an Esquire front cover shot of Megan Fox from 2009, which was a purposefully taken still from footage from a RED one video camera. I don't see any way around it personally, I think stills from moving footage will eventually take over in a similar way to the digital market over taking film. Better tech means less skill required to do the job....

Discuss :)
 
it's ridiculous . a true pro will use whatever he/she wants. all that counts is - originality / pleasing the client etc.

people have been able to take stills from motion cameras long time ago .

+ don't believe that RED is classed as video camera anyway . a 5d or so is I think.
 
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