[adwb]

I want to use my K30 to shoot short videos with the specific purpose of extracting stills from the footage.

I read or saw something somewhere about matching the shutter speed to the frame rate which if I remember correctly was supposed to give juddery video but looked like it might give a better choice of frames to select from.

Given the choices the k30 offers with not only frame rates but a manual selection mode can anyone suggest the best way to achieve my goal of extracting still hq sharp images

[johnmflores]

You are aware that even at 1080P you can only pull 2 megapickle still images, right?

[adwb]

yes thanks even 2 megaPICKLE images are ok.

[amoringello]

You need two things.
1) high shutter speed to eliminate blurry images. Some blur is normally fine as moving objects can look a bit odd if there is absolutely no blur between frames.
So you need to be able to adjust shutter speed separately from frame rate.
Pentax gives no direct control of this but if you have enough light, the shutter speed should automatically be high enough. Something like f/8 in bright sun at ISO100 should give a shutter speed rate of about 1/200 while the camera is recording at 25 or 30 frames per second.


2) You will probably want uncompressed video. Or at least video that compresses each frame separately;
I do not know for sure, but I believe the method Pentax uses compresses each frame based on deltas from the prior frame.
The single frame quality that I have seen is quite poor if a majority of the frame is not completely static. i.e. if you're panning the camera.
If your sitting still and a person is moving through the frame, it might be OK.
Of course, I may be doing something wrong with importing the video (???) so it would be worth hearing someone more knowledgable in video.
Or do some Google on Pentax's compression method.

[TCSJordan]

You need two things.
1) high shutter speed to eliminate blurry images. Some blur is normally fine as moving objects can look a bit odd if there is absolutely no blur between frames.
So you need to be able to adjust shutter speed separately from frame rate.
Pentax gives no direct control of this but if you have enough light, the shutter speed should automatically be high enough. Something like f/8 in bright sun at ISO100 should give a shutter speed rate of about 1/200 while the camera is recording at 25 or 30 frames per second.

Shutter speed is controllable on the K30, so just set the shutter speed you would normally use for stills. The video will look very jerky, but that's the tradeoff for sharp stills.

2) You will probably want uncompressed video. Or at least video that compresses each frame separately;
I do not know for sure, but I believe the method Pentax uses compresses each frame based on deltas from the prior frame.
The single frame quality that I have seen is quite poor if a majority of the frame is not completely static. i.e. if you're panning the camera.
If your sitting still and a person is moving through the frame, it might be OK.
Of course, I may be doing something wrong with importing the video (???) so it would be worth hearing someone more knowledgable in video.
Or do some Google on Pentax's compression method.

Pentax's compression is H.264, which is fine unless the entire frame is filled with movement. H.264 also prioritizes the data rate for the area in focus, so if you are shooting with wider apertures, you will have less compression issues. As a side not, avoid the 60P mode. Not only is your resolution dropped down to a single megapixel, but the aliasing and moire is pretty awful.

[jogiba]

Here is a screen capture from a 1080p60 video I shot today of a tree with a 24mm F1.4 Pentax mount Rokinon lens @F5.6 from about 9" away on my Sony NEX-VG900 full frame camcorder:

[Steve.Ledger]

I use Splayer to play all video types on my PCs - one of the features is to save stills from the footage too.

Here's a random still saved from a 1080p video shot with the Pentax Q.
(Forum software has resized it - here's a link to the 1920x1080 still)

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Last edited by Steve.Ledger; 10-25-2013 at 06:31 AM.

[adwb]

Thanks for the suggestions