Grabing a still image from my video

[Lloyd Coleman]

Bruce,

“hi-res” and “video clip” don’t belong in the same sentence. Standard video is only 720×480 pixels in size. This is equivalent to the picture taken with camera with less than 1/2 mega pixel (I think many camera phone are greater than this now), so you won’t be able to get a very decent print from a video grab. This is how you get the picture. Try it and see if it is good enough for your purposes:

1. Select the track the video is on.
2. Place the current time marker where you want to grab the picture from.
3. Select ‘file’ then ‘export’ then ‘frame’
4. Give the file a name and put it in the file you would like
5. In the settings box under ‘general’ chose the type of file you would like to create (bitmap, TIFF, etc)
5. In the settings box under ‘Keyframe and Rendering’ choose ‘Deinterlace Video Footage’
6. Save the file.
7. You can also deinterlace in Photoshop or other programs. Try it and see if it gives you better results than deinterlacing when you export. You can also use Photoshop to do other tings to help the print like adjust contrast, sharpen, etc to help the picture as well as increasing the resolution of the frame, although with the small size of the original I don’t think you will be able to produce a still picture that you can print very large. People often use video grabs for things like DVD covers, but they don’t often look very good.

Good luck.

[Bruce Rutland]

Hi Lloyd,

Thanks for the tips – I’ll have a go and see if I can achieve the results I’m looking for.

All the best,

Bruce.