... is there something to go the other way? Turn a video in to say, a .png?

I have a couple stock footage cloud videos that I want to use as a moving background on an animation. I already rendered that to image file, but I don't want to use chroma keying to put the clouds in because it leaves aritifacts.

Know if anything that would work to do what I am trying to do? Beyond Adobe After Effects, please. The cost of that program alone is a show stopper for me.

Why not just load the AVI as an animated texture on a 1 sided square for a gackground?

You can do this in virtualDub (convert avi to png)

Load your movie, go to menu [FILE] > [QUEUE BATCH OPERATION] > [SAVE IMAGE SEQUENCE] and the dialog window will appear where you can set picture format you want (including png), frame range and destination folder.

Pls note that in earlier versions of VD this option is located directly under [FILE] menu (I think so)

I use virtualdub mod, but I think it is the same in all the virtualdub versions.

Open the avi file, in the file menu click in "save sequence" slect your options.

Ahhh, ok. The next problem is easy for me to solve. I just checked and the video files are wmv, so I have to convert them to an uncompressed .avi...

Thanks for the quick responses.

And BionicRooster, I may try that trick in the future. I just usually don't render my backgrounds or props unless the character is going to interact with them, or they are crucial to the lighting (like a building or something).

You can grab individual frames using VirtualDub.

You can open wmv with VD.

what you need is:

http://home.comcast.net/~fcchandler/Plugins/WMV/index.html and put it into plugin32 or plugins64 folder (make such folder inside VD folder).

second thing you need is: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6191 just install it.

Thanks Adom. I converted them to AVI, but I will grab those two programs so I won't have to eat up so much time in the future.

For video tools, a great site is www.videohelp.com, look in tools section.