What's the best way to make a sill image from a movie file? I need it high quality

[oxband]

I have a movie file which is a low quality footage. The film has a few photos that I wanna use as photos. I made freeze frames in FCP 7 and exported them. I wonder if there is another way.

What's the best way to make stills from a movie file?

 

[Gwendolini]

If it is low quality footage, exporting it as high quality JPG or even PNG or TIFF (a bit overkill probably) will suffice.

You can also use MPEG Streamclip to make the process faster or use VLC Player to export screenshots.

 

[Dave Braine]

Your "still" will be the same low quality that your movie is.

 

[kohlson]

As others have said, the best you can do it a screen capture/freeze frame export. Maybe improve it slightly from there with PhotoShop or similar.

 

[joema2]

I have a movie file which is a low quality footage. The film has a few photos that I wanna use as photos. I made freeze frames in FCP 7 and exported them. I wonder if there is another way....What's the best way to make stills from a movie file?

It is possible in Photoshop to use image stacking methods and get a better quality still from several similar video frames. The procedure is discussed in this tutorial: https://www.slrlounge.com/take-high-quality-still-image-video-ease-photoshop/

However there are even better methods than this, as described in this academic paper "Video Snapshots: Creating High-Quality Images from Video Clips" (Sunkavalli, 2012): http://tinyurl.com/zo3b7we

However I don't know if any current products use these methods yet.

 

[phrehdd]

Skipping over the excellent suggestions above, the "better" images created will come most likely from the parts of your film with the least amount of action. Grabbing a "frame" of a dog running will most likely not be as sharp as watching a dog sitting. Take advantage when possible of this facet of your film as needed.