Creating a still image from video in FCP

How do you make a still image from HD video in FCP?

How do you create this image with best, sharpest quality for printing?

I need still shots of interview subjects for a slide show / promotional materials.

FCP 6.0
Mac OX 10.4.11
Powerbook G4

Thank you!!

Export QT conversion, select still image, and choose tiff, millions of colors.

HD video is only 1920x1080 at best, it's still far short of poster size, if that's what you're looking for.



www.strypesinpost.com

It's likely that you are working with an anamorphic HD format. i.e. the raw video of the data is being stretched by FCP to make it look right in FCP. When you export it to a still it will look squished. You can use any graphics program to adjust the horizontal dimension to make it look right.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

I didn't realize tiff was the best format, strypes! Thanks.

Leslie, that's how you create a still from your FCP timeline.

As Andrew also suggested, if it's an HDV image, for example, you need to stretch it. I do it in Photoshop.

First de-interlace (if it's interlaced). The Photoshop "de-interlace" filter is excellent. It's under filters > video > de-interlace.

To stretch the anamorphic image, go to "image size" and uncheck the box "constrain proportions" then enter, if your image is 1920x1080, in the width and height boxes 1920 and 1440. That will result in a 16:9 flat image.

You will notice your image will be huge under the dimensions box below the upper data. That's good. To be able to get a nice big print of your image, change the "resolution" to 300 and set the size of the pixel dimensions to, say 640x480.

Notice, I tripled the resolution and lowered the 1920x1440 pixel dimensions to one third. This way the image will retain its best quality.

I recently had to come up with a poster for the Ava Gardner Indie Film Festival, where my feature film shot with my Sony Z1U camera, had its world premiere. Because I was enlarging the image from my movie to poster size, the colors were getting a bit mushy, so I added a "texturizer" filter in Photoshop. Here is one version of the poster image:

> To be able to get a nice big print of your image, change the "resolution" to 300 and set the size
>of the pixel dimensions to, say 640x480.

No. Don't. Firstly, DPI/PPI has only bearings when you are trying to print, and if you are going to print, you reduce/enlarge to the size you need. It's not a third, not a quarter, but the size you need, unnecessary frame resizing as you will cause you to lose resolution.

Also, 640x480 is 4:3, not a 16:9 frame. Resizing your picture to that will distort the image. Crop it if you want.



www.strypesinpost.com

Oh, I didn't know that too, strypes! So I should just de-interlace and adjust the frame to flat and then take the image to the printers? What's an ideal size to end up with a 40x27 inch poster?

And if you're going to use the images for printing -- any size -- what should the resolution and dimensions be?

I use BlowUp 2 for frame dumps I want to enhance--

[www.alienskin.com]

- Loren

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Thanks, Loren. That is a beautiful plugin ... $249!!!!

>What's an ideal size to end up with a 40x27 inch poster?

Somewhere around 14k pixels wide. You do the math for the rest. But if you're going out for a poster of that size, you need to enhance the hell out of the picture. Not sure if you can do it feasibly, since you start with less than 1/5th the amount of pixels on a heavily compressed format.



www.strypesinpost.com

I don't think there's space here to delve into the specifics of DPI and what it means to go from video to print, but suffice it to say that video stills -- even ones pulled from HD -- will never equal the quality of a nice large photograph (whether film or a high-megapixel image).

In print production we always went by the rule that all of our images had to be 300 dpi (sometimes 400, depends on the printer) at 100% of their final size. We used to scan lots of transparencies so you had to do the math to do the enlargement; a photo that you were going to be enlarging by 200% would be scanned at 600 dpi and so forth. The same rule applies to processing digital files; hopefully you're scaling DOWN and not up, because you can always reduce a larger image and not lose quality; smaller images tend to fall apart or look soft when enlarging (just like SD to HD).

To get a sense of how big a file you need, open a new document in Photoshop and set the height and width to inches (not pixels) and set the DPI to 300. Drop your exported video still into a new layer and see how small it is compared to the document; that's how much bigger your file would need to be to be considered print quality. (Inkjet printers, BTW, tend to max out at 200 dpi. So if you're not printing on an offset press you can get away with smaller images).

We've all been in a bind where we have nothing but video stills to make marketing materials for a project, and there are ways to make them work. But there's a reason why big studio film posters look so good; they're not shot with video cameras.

JK

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