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I am looking for a good and free option to convert AVCHD (Full-HD from a Panasonic Lumix GH1) to image sequences. I am currently using Blender but it is cumbersome in that it only allows me to convert the videos if I disable the preview - should the preview be open in my workspace, Blender halts for about 1-2 mins until it shows a preview image - any further click on the preview halts it again.

It can very well be a command line tool (I am willing to craft the command line options myself if needed).

The output images can be any common format (PNG, JPG, even TIFF). The conversion to image sequences is asked for because Blender (that I use as editing software) has no problems with image sequences and other formats but AVCHD seems to still be painful.

Thanks!

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Wonderful ffmpeg command line utility is the solution. Just check their documentation, but something like the following will probably work for your case:

ffmpeg -i video.mts video%05d.png

This will take your video, and create video00001.png, video00002.png... files in the same folder.

You can find a lot of guides for ffmpeg, or ask here for a specific soltion. We can try to figure out.

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    thanks @Inan for the ffmpeg tip! I'll try that one. I even think Blender is using FFMPEG internally but I want to find a way to invoke the conversion without Blender throwing a fit. Maybe I will try to code up a Python script to do the conversion (in the style of double-clicking the script in a folder with a video file and it then automatically creates a sub-folder and writes out the video as single images to the subfolder - basically a script which you can use point-blank on a folder with a video file in it - should I code it, I will post it here as a solution)
    – Erik
    Commented Dec 15, 2012 at 23:47
  • @Erik, yes Blender uses ffmpeg in Linux and Windows builds but as far as I know you can also build Blender with ffmpeg option under Mac Os. Writing a script is a good idea for a quick tool, please let us know about the results.
    – Inan
    Commented Dec 16, 2012 at 18:33

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