Best way to take a screen grab

[Galen Carter-Jeffrey]

I just shot some camera tests and I want to take a high quality screen grab using final cut pro. What is the best way to do this? How do get rid of all the video stuff that appears in some freeze frames?

[Hans Kellner]

Display your clip in the timeline. Select the single frame you want to export. Then from the menu:

 

File > Export... > Using QuickTime Conversion

 

Select the Still Image format setting. Click the Options button and select the format of the exported image (e.g. jpeg). Click Ok.

 

Then export the image.

 

When you mention getting rid of the "video stuff" do you mean the interlace artifacts?

[Chance Shirley]

Also note that Final Cut usually exports NTSC at 720x480 or 720x486. This is fine for television, which displays non-square pixels. However, for computer viewing, you'll need to resize the grabs to 640x480 (or 640x486). If you happened to get your footage transferred with a 16x9 "squeeze," you'll need to resize to 854x480.

[Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC]

I always found quicktime conversion to add a lot of aliasing and compression artifacts. Now a days I make a new sequence and clip out single frames from the project and place them all into the new sequence. Then I export it through compressor as a Tiff sequence and then pull into photoshop then compress and correct them if needed. If you have interlacing problems there is a de-interlace filter in compressor.

[Michael Nash]

You can also use the Grab utility...

[Jaan Shenberger]

the best way for higher than 10-bit format footage:

import footage into after effects, interpret the footage correctly, then export the frame from the comp timeline as a 16-bit psd file.

 

for 10-bit or lower:

open in quicktime player, go to the frame you want, cntl-c (copy), then paste into a photoshop doc (for 10 bit footage, pasting into a 16-bit doc is better) so you can resize to make up for the aforementioned non-square pixel aspect ratio. if it's dv25 (aka. dv / miniDV / dvcam), you will need to change the quicktime player display quality flag to "high quality" (qt player by default displays dv footage in a kinda blurry state to ensure that all computers can play it back in realtime, which isn't really relevant for any computers made in the last six years). you can change the high quality flag if you have quicktime pro by going into "movie properties" (command-j) and clicking "visual settings" and toggling the "high quality" checkbox. or you can download a free utility that will change the flag for you (whether you have qt pro or not)... it's called "HiQual". http://www.synthetic-ap.com/products/hiq/index.html

 

hope this helps.

[Evan Ferrario]

I've always had luck just taking a screen shot of the video and making sure I dont get any of the box in it when i crop it. Shift-apple 4 takes the screen shot, then you just select the image. You probably need higher quality but you'd be suprised how good they come out.