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Export Frame Grabs (from QT7)
Slightly OT here, a question about Quicktime Pro 7.
I often must provide lots of frame grabs from ProRes edits after they are completed. Rather than launching Final Cut (7), I prefer to use Quicktime’s Export function since I am not always at the Final Cut system machine when I have to do this.
It’s a fast and relatively few-click process, but the problem is it seems to be broken. No matter which “Movie to Picture” format option I choose, such as JPEG or PNG or None, the resulting exported image is a .pct file. PICT is generally unsupported and requires a bunch of further steps to provide usable images to the client, or to clean up recent versions of PhotoShop.
Anyone know why QT7 is ignoring its own settings? Or another method to export high quality frames from a ProRes file?
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4 Replies
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U can somewhat batch this process using fcp export queue
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Sometimes I can’t be at the FCP machine, so if I only have the ProRes file and QT Pro on a laptop, I need a solution that I thought could simply be QT Pro, if it wasn’t broken.
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I don’t know how exact the frames need to be on a particular time of the video. But what I do a lot is use the crab frame function of Mac OSx which is a keyboard shortcut command plus shift +4 and as the videos playing you grab screen grabs of the video and if it’s in QuickTime seven you can take it into Photoshop and batch crop the player with Snow Leopard it’s a borderless playback but will copy the drop shadow so I still take that into Photoshop and crop it. This is just a quick run and gun way of grabbing screen grabs but it’s certainly easier than exporting through QuickTime Pro.
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Thanks for the suggestion, Jason. Although for this situation I have many images required, and a size/quality uniform standard to deliver. Cropping drop shadows and ensuring that every grab is an exact 1920×1080 dimension is a lot of extra tedium, plus, quality might be a little off considering it’s a screen grab rather than a “direct” conversion from ProRes to TIFF.
FWIW exporting from Quicktime 7 is actually very easy and convenient, other than the danged format output selection being broken, allowing only PICT exports. Why is it broken? Why are those other formats offered but not doable? It’s a Mac mystery.
BUT ANYWAY– I did figure a workflow for a non-FCP machine to export chosen frames from a ProRes movie file into TIFF or JPEG or PNG. It’s good old MPEG Streamclip. A single keyboard command, a format choice, and there’s your still; same effort as Quicktime but reliable result.
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