Taking picture of falling ball using digital video camera

I am interested in taking picture of a ball falling from say 10 meters. Once I have the digital video, want to pluck frames that are say 0.5 seconds apart.

Basically want to create an exercise for middle school students to teach computation of speed and acceleration, ... and compare the acceleration to g

Is this possible with normal digital video cameras and freeware or cheap software?

Any help would be appreciated.

Yes, it's possible. I use Ulead Video Studio for all of my video editing. It costs $99 for the latest version and maybe less for an academic version. Also, previous versions of VS come bundled free with some types of hardware such video cards or video cameras.

VS has a timeline editing mode which allows you to "capture" individual frames at specific times on the video.