AVI to PNG Converter

Pulling Still Frames Out of an AVI: What This Guide Covers

This walkthrough is for anyone who needs stills out of an AVI clip as PNG images — one grabbed frame for a thumbnail, a bug report or a reference shot, or a whole numbered sequence for editing, rotoscoping or frame-by-frame inspection. AVI is Microsoft's RIFF-based container from November 1992; converting to PNG decodes the frames you point at and writes each one out as a standalone image. Two settings decide almost everything about the result: which frames get captured, and which Quality Preset the PNG encoder uses. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours later.

How to Convert AVI to PNG

1. Upload Your AVI File: Drag your clip onto the page or click "+ Add Files". You can queue several AVI files and they all run with the same settings.
2. Choose Which Frames to Capture: In Advanced Options, the Frame Selection group opens on Specific Frame with Time (seconds) set to 0 — the very first frame. Type a timestamp for a different moment, or switch to Multiple Screenshots and set a Capture Rate to pull a sequence.
3. Set the Quality Preset and Resolution (Optional): Quality Preset opens on Very High (Recommended); choose Highest if you need a true-colour, unquantised frame. Image resolution can stay on Keep original or be scaled with Preset Resolutions, Width x Height or Resolution Percentage.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Specific Frame returns a single PNG; Multiple Screenshots returns one PNG per captured moment, delivered together as a zip. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Frame Selection and the Quality Preset

Frame Selection is the control that shapes your output, and it has exactly two modes.

Left alone, Specific Frame with Time set to 0 gives you the opening frame — which is fine for a quick grab, but the first frame of a clip is frequently black, a fade-in or a slate. Type the timestamp you actually want. The value is in seconds, not frame numbers, so 90 means one minute thirty, not the ninetieth frame.

The Quality Preset deserves more attention than it usually gets, because PNG's reputation for being lossless only holds at the top setting.

Alongside those, two PNG-specific controls only exist on PNG output: Compression level (1-10, opening at 6) governs how hard the DEFLATE pass works, and Compression speed (1-10, opening at 4) trades encoder time against output size. Neither changes the picture at the Highest preset; they only affect how tightly the file is packed.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "I got a black image" — Time (seconds) is still 0 and the clip opens on black or a fade-in. Type a timestamp a few seconds into the action.
• "The colours look banded or posterised" — that is the default preset's palette-quantisation pass doing its job. Switch Quality Preset to Highest, which skips quantisation entirely and hides the Colors control.
• "The frame is blurry or smeared" — you landed on fast motion or an interlaced field. Nudge Time (seconds) by a tenth of a second, or capture several nearby moments and keep the sharpest.
• "I got hundreds of PNGs and a huge zip" — the Capture Rate is too dense. At 1 second per frame a five-minute clip is already 300 images; at 0.1 s it is 3,000. Slow the rate, or trim your expectations to the section you need.
• "The timestamp grabbed the wrong moment" — the box takes seconds with decimals, not frame numbers or HH:MM:SS. Convert first: 1 minute 30 is 90.
• "The PNGs are too big to email" — full-resolution stills are large by nature. Drop Preset Resolutions to something smaller, run the output through the image compressor, or use AVI to JPG if lossless frames are not the point.

When This Doesn't Work

Frame extraction assumes the AVI decodes cleanly from start to finish. A truncated download or a file with a damaged idx1 index may fail outright or stop partway, and repairing or re-exporting the source is the only real fix. Encrypted or DRM-protected files cannot be decoded by any converter. And if what you actually want is motion rather than stills, PNG is the wrong target entirely — AVI to GIF produces a short looping animation, and AVI to MP4 keeps it as video that plays anywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the extracted PNG frames lossless?

Only at the Highest Quality Preset. PNG's DEFLATE compression is lossless in itself, but the default Very High preset first runs a palette-quantisation pass that reduces the number of distinct colours to shrink the file — visually close, but not pixel-identical to the decoded frame. Choose Highest when the frame needs to be exact; you can tell it took effect because the Colors and Compression speed controls disappear when there is no quantisation stage left to configure. Either way, the source video's own codec artefacts are already baked into the frame before the PNG encoder sees it.

Which frame do I get if I change nothing?

The first one. Frame Selection opens on Specific Frame with Time (seconds) at 0, which grabs the opening frame of the clip. That is a sensible default for a quick grab but a poor thumbnail, since plenty of clips start on black, a fade or a title card. Type a timestamp before converting.

How do I get a whole sequence instead of one image?

Switch Frame Selection to Multiple Screenshots and pick a Capture Rate. The dropdown runs from 0.1 seconds (one frame at 10 fps) through 1 second per frame — the setting it opens on — out to 10 seconds per frame. The output is one PNG per captured moment, numbered and delivered as a zip. Start slower than you think you need; re-running at a denser rate is cheap, sorting through 3,000 images is not.

How many files will Multiple Screenshots produce?

Clip length divided by the capture rate. A five-minute clip at 1 second per frame is 300 images; the same clip at 0.5 seconds is 600, and at 0.1 seconds it is 3,000. If you only need a section, use a slower rate and crop your expectations rather than generating the lot and deleting most of them.

Why is a single PNG so much larger than that moment was inside the AVI?

Because video and stills compress on completely different principles. Video codecs mostly store the differences between frames, so any one frame may occupy only a few kilobytes inside the stream. A PNG has to stand alone: a 1920 x 1080 frame is about 6 MB of raw RGB pixels before compression, and lossless compression of photographic content only takes that so far. This is normal, and it is exactly why the palette-quantisation preset exists.

Will the PNG frames have a transparent background?

No. The video codecs found inside AVI files in practice carry no alpha channel, so every decoded frame is fully opaque and the PNG is written that way. PNG itself supports transparency, but there is none in the source to preserve — you would have to mask the subject in an image editor afterwards.

Should I extract frames as PNG or JPG?

PNG when the frame is going into an editor, a comparison, a document or anything where re-compression artefacts would compound — and set the preset to Highest for that. AVI to JPG when you want many small files for a contact sheet, a web gallery or a quick preview, since JPEG is far smaller for photographic frames and the extra loss is invisible at sensible quality levels.

Can I ask for an exact frame number rather than a timestamp?

Not directly — the input is a time in seconds. To land on a specific frame, divide by the clip's frame rate: frame 250 of 25 fps footage is 10, and frame 250 of 29.97 fps footage is about 8.342. For frame-exact work on long clips, stepping through in a desktop player and reading off the timecode is more reliable than arithmetic.

What happens to my files after conversion?

Your AVI is uploaded over an encrypted connection and converted on our servers. The upload and the resulting PNGs or zip are deleted automatically a few hours later, there is no sign-up and no watermark, and files are never shared or made public.