This site serves students in DGST 101: Intro to Digital Studies at the University of Mary Washington but is open to all. All content here is CC BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
It may seem redundant to create visual representations of media that are already visual, but we can do with computer is analyze those visual texts in a way or at a scale that reveals more about their composition, structure, origins, or meanings.
What do you learn about a film by viewing it as a barcode-style image? Or as a single composite frame? What can you learn from thousands of selfies?
In this module, apply one or more of these techniques to some visual text in order to provide new perspectives on its aesthetics.
Whatever approach you take to this module, there's a good chance that FFMPEG will make your work easier and faster. This is a command-line application that can do many, many things, including extracting frames from video.
To install it on a Mac, use the Terminal:
brew install ffmpegFFmpeg also works on Windows, but installing it involves a few more steps.
Either way, let's say you have a movie saved as "the_godfather.mp4" (it can be called whatever you want, that's just what it is in this example) in a folder by itself with a subfolder called "frames". To extract 6 frames per second, the command would be:
ffmpeg -i the_godfather.mp4 -r 6 frames/img-%05d.jpgNote: this will generate thousands of images, so make sure your hard drive can handle it. Once you've got all these, you can try processing them with IMJ or ImageJ.
FFMPEG is software that runs in a command line, but there are GUIs and web applications that let you use this tool without installing it directly. Those applications will be limited in various ways, but they can be an accessible option.
For extracting frames from a video file, frame-extractor.com seems to work well enough, though it processes more slowly than FFMPEG.