I would like to take a freezeframe from FCP to Photoshop to work up some handouts for the next film festival. The .png file from FCP5 in Photoshop is, of course, distorted because of the difference in pixel shape. How do I correct for this or should I have selected another file type when exporting?
I always select still and then jpeg and it has worked fine for me. Once in photoshop I create a duplicate and delete the original, this makes it a psd file and you can work with that.
> I always select still and then jpeg and it has worked fine for me
No no no...don't export as JPEG. You're creating more picture damage for no reason, and a frozen video still isn't very good to begin with. Use TIFF, TARGA or PICT.
De-interlace that still as soon as you get it to Photoshop (you'll see the difference immediately). The distorted look is because Photoshop deals in square pixels and video in non-square. Correct it in PS by setting Image > Pixel Aspect Ratio to DV/NTSC (or DV/PAL), OR change the image size to 648x480 (NTSC) which is an adjustment by 0.9 to the horizontal dimension (turn Contrain Proportion OFF to do this).