Every video or animation we see on our television, computer, phone, tablet or even at the movie theater is made up from a succession of still images. These images are then played one after the other several times a second which fools our eye into thinking that the object is moving. The quicker the images are played, the smoother and more fluid the movement looks.

Most movies and TV programs are filmed at around 24-30 images per second, each individual image is called a frame which is where we see the term frames per second (FPS). A video file on a computer simply stores all the frames together and plays them in order, and the total frames stored for a typical movie reaches into the hundreds of thousands. If we want to capture an image of one or two frames it’s quite easy and we simply pause the video and press the Print Screen key.

If we want to extract a succession or range of frames or even all frames from a short video clip, capturing the images one at a time is incredibly inefficient and time consuming. For that purpose, we need a program that can extract however many video frames we want and save them to image files automatically, like jpg or png.

Here, is the Matlab code that is helpful in extracting the video frames and saving them as images.