Extracting Still from footage Perseving Max Quality

[Miriam Moran]

Hi Jonathan,

Need a little info to give you “best” advice but here are a couple of approaches (this is something I do all the time) –

If you’re lucky enough to be on Leopard (you won’t believe this) double-click on one of your .mov files to open it in Quicktime, play it, pause it at the frame you want, click on the frame and drag it onto your desktop or into a folder in Finder, and voila, a still frame just what the dr ordered. When I do this they are exactly the way I need them – just use Photoshop for any color correction, cropping, etc. I need to do.

If not (tiger or before) – File -> Export -> Using Quicktime Conversion – go through and set your options – Still Image gives you 1 frame (the frame your playhead is parked on) Still Image Sequence gives you a still for each frame in the clip you have selected (don’t pick a big one, the files pile up fast). Set the JPEG option, be sure you choose best quality.

When you open these files in Photoshop, you will probably need to use “Filter -> Video -> Deinterlace” to get rid of the horizontal lines in the picture and also fix your pixel aspect ratio.

If you’re in HD, I’ve had some luck with creating a new 720 sequence (I edit in 1080i), copying my clip into that sequence, say “yes” to change clip settings to match sequence (or “no” to change sequence to match clip – I forget which way it is worded and my computer is disassembled at the moment) then export that into still frames using the “export” steps above. I don’t need to do the Photoshop files at that point.

To avoid a 6 page answer, give the above a try, and if they don’t work, don’t hesitate to contact me – my computer should be reassembled tomorrow and I can send you additional suggestions.

Good luck – Miriam