Using VLC as your media player is a great way to watch videos and movies on your computer. But did you know that you can also use VLC to view and move a video frame by frame?
By enabling the Advanced Controls, you can easily access the frame-by-frame button and move through your videos one frame at a time.
This article will guide you through all the steps necessary to view and skip through a video frame by frame in VLC. I’ll cover all the possible ways (there’s 3) and a few alternative options that also covers reverse or previous frame stepping.
If you’re looking for an easy way to get detailed analysis of your videos or slow down to view specific scenes, then look no further than VLC.
Key Takeaways
- VLC Media Player users can search and skip through a video frame by frame using the dedicated toolbar button, preset hotkey, or by setting your own hotkeys.
- You can also use VLC to play video frame by frame backwards or in reverse through the use of a VLC add-on called “Jump to time Previous frame v3”.
- Most users want something called “previous frame stepping” in VLC. Next Frame stepping is already a feature in VLC!
- To compensate for the lack of previous frame keys, the most common workaround is using the E key to move forward one frame at a time.
If you happen to miss the desired frame, use CTRL-T to go back 1 to 3 seconds and then move forward again. Let’s explore frame by frame in depth.
How to view and move a Video frame by frame in VLC
You’ll need to have VLC and the video you want to view the next frame of. Keep in mind, there is more than one way to do this (hotkeys, toolbar button, preset shortcut buttons).
- Open the video you want to watch in VLC.
- Press the E key on your keyboard while the video is playing. This will stop the video and display a “Next frame” message in the upper-right corner of the video.
- Press the E key again to skip to the next frame.
- Repeat step 3 for each subsequent frame until you get to the frame you want to start watching from.
- Once you reach the desired frame, press the Spacebar to begin playing the video.
- To pause the video again, press the Spacebar again.
As mentioned earlier, there is a workaround for the lack of previous frame keys – it is common to use the E key to advance one frame at a time.
CTRL-T will allow you to move back one to three seconds if you miss the desired frame. Taking a closer look at each frame will help us understand it better.
Some users like to set the frame by frame before screen recording a video in VLC so they can get the right time frame down.
How to customize the hotkeys in VLC so that you can move frame by frame
In VLC, you can customize hotkeys for moving frame by frame to make it easier and more efficient to use.
The following steps will let you change the hotkeys that control frame-by-frame skipping in VLC:
- Open VLC and navigate to Tools > Preferences > Hotkeys.
- In the Hotkeys settings menu, find the “Next frame” option from the list and change it to the desired key (such as E or another one you prefer).
- To customize the E hotkey (or any other), double-click the hotkey and press the new key on your keyboard that you want to use instead.
- Once you’ve made the desired changes, click the Save button to save your new hotkey settings.
You’ll be able to adjust it to your own preferences., which will make it more convenient to move frame by frame when watching or preparing a video to trim or cut in VLC (especially if the E key isn’t ideal for you).
Using the toolbar to control frame by frame viewing in VLC
By enabling the Advanced Controls, you can easily access the frame-by-frame button and move through videos one frame at a time. This is ideal if you prefer to use the mouse over the keyboard to use the VLC video player frame by frame.
Here are the steps to use on-screen controls to move videos in VLC frame-by-frame:
- Open VLC and click on the View menu at the top of the screen.
- From the View menu, click on the “Advanced Controls” option. This will add a set of new controls to the media player screen in VLC.
- Look for the “frame-by-frame” button among the new controls. This button looks like a play button with a straight line before it.
- Click the “frame-by-frame” button to move the video one frame at a time. Keep clicking the button to continue moving frame by frame until you reach the desired frame.
Again, it’s important to note this isn’t the only way of controlling next frame or frame by frame viewing – you can use on-screen controls that are useful when you prefer not to use keyboard shortcuts to navigating between frames while using the VLC player.
The benefits of going through a video frame by frame
Going through (or viewing) a video frame by frame offers several benefits, including detailed analysis, enhanced comprehension, better editing, and improved accuracy.
It is useful when working with technical content, educational or training videos, or in forensic video analysis.
Related: Is a Macbook Air good for video editing?
It helps to identify specific details accurately and spot errors or imperfections. Overall, it provides a better understanding of video content, improves editing capabilities, and enhances analysis accuracy.
FAQ
Are digital movies stored as individual frames like analog film?
Digital movies are not stored as individual frames like analog film movies. Instead, each “frame” only shows the pixels that have changed since the last frame, rather than the entire image.
Therefore, if you want to step backward in a digital movie, you would need to go through every single frame until you reach the previous one.
This process would require a lot of computing power and would likely cause significant delays and lagging – especially if the frames are not cached in memory
How are Next Frame keys in youtube different from VLC?
This is more of an opinion based on tests and observation, so the answer varies. YouTube has implemented previous and next frame keys (comma and period) for all their videos. I’ve found that certain video formats only need to cache a single, additional “full frame” in memory – for every step you want to move back.
When switching to the previous frame, you can simply retrieve the cached full back frame and then retrieve all the change frames from disk that come after the back frame up to the previous frame. Even if you must also cache the change frames, the steps in this post are a much more efficient method than caching multiple full frames.
Note: YouTube has had the previous and next frame keys feature for over a decade now. In digital video, frames are presented at a certain frame rate, which is a crucial element of video playback.
Conclusion
Overall, frame-by-frame viewing in VLC offers a range of benefits for viewers and video editors alike.
Whether you’re analyzing technical content or editing a video project, this feature can help you identify specific details accurately and achieve greater precision in your analysis.
Using the VLC video player to view frames one at a time is easy; simply enable Advanced Controls and click the “frame-by-frame” button. Additionally, there are key shortcuts in YouTube that can help you move between frames efficiently.
