Export CSQ frames to PNG

A thermal recording is usually needed one frame at a time — the moment the bearing ran hot, the frame that goes in the report. This exports frames from a .csq file as PNG images, singly or as a batch in a ZIP archive, without FLIR software.

A single frame

Open the recording, scrub to the frame you want, choose a palette, and save the image. The frame is rendered at the sensor's own resolution, so nothing is upscaled or interpolated on the way out.

A range of frames

1. Open the recording and press Batch export.
2. Set the first and last frame. Up to 960 frames go in one archive, which covers most captures; a longer recording can be taken in several passes.
3. Optionally set a step, to take every second or fifth frame — useful for a long, slow thermal event where consecutive frames barely differ.
4. Start the export. Frames are rendered server-side and arrive as a single ZIP, numbered in order so they sort correctly and drop straight into ffmpeg or a report.

When you want numbers, not pictures

A PNG is a picture of a measurement, not the measurement. The palette has already mapped temperature onto colour, and that mapping is not reliably invertible — so if the next step is analysis rather than a document, export the temperatures directly.

The viewer writes a frame's temperatures as a two-dimensional JSON array, one value per pixel in degrees Celsius, laid out row by row. That loads into NumPy, MATLAB, R or a spreadsheet without anything having to guess what a colour meant.

[[21.4, 21.5, 21.7, ...],
 [21.3, 21.6, 22.0, ...],
 ...]

Keeping frames comparable

This matters more for a batch than for a single frame. With per-frame scaling each image is stretched across its own minimum and maximum, so a frame where nothing is hot looks just as dramatic as one where something is — and the same colour means a different temperature in every image.

Use global scaling for a sequence meant to be read as a sequence. One range covers the whole recording, colours mean the same thing throughout, and change over time is something you can actually see.

Frequently asked

Export frames from a CSQ file