Exporting high quality framegrab from timeline
 

How do you guys do it? I'll be using these framegrabs for DVD covers and etc.

Xpress. Liquid, or one of the other products? In Liquid, I add the "camera" icon and grab a progressive BMP. The quality is based on the material and timeline you do the grab from.

From my experience, you just cannot get a 5megapixel pic from SD material. But you can add blur to the still or another filter to cover the lower quality. If you need high quality, you can shoot the same scene with a good still camera.

Photoshop is your friend. Make sure you 'de-interlace' in the video filters of photoshop. It won't be really high quality, but it CAN hold up to something label sized. Go to my website for my documentary and click on the 'still's section. All of those are frame grabs. I used a couple on the poster and back of the DVD, they looked good. http://americanjouster.com/screenshots.php

I'm using Avid Adrenaline. Still the same method? Another question: is the dimension of the framegrab similar to the source video?

Thanks for the tip on hiding the artifacts!

Park your timeline cursor on the frame you want. Mark an 'in and out' point right there. Go to "file" and Export - pick 'Graphic'. In the options menu, you'll have all sorts of choices and controlls for what type of file to export it as. Depending on what your final manipulationg program is for your graphic work, you might want JPG or TIFF or PICT... whatever. Export three or four examples of each while you're parked on a frame. Try different settings such as progressive, or single field. Then bring them into your graphics program and fire away.

Thanks alot Richard for your help! It was really simple and I'm quite happy with the stills, even though they had artifacts but nothing some Photoshop work can't solve.

A step beyond... If it has too much noise, get a denoiser. Some packages have them, but Neat Image is one of the best for denoising stills. You can clean up a lot of gain noise with it.

Not sure what you mean by 'artifacts'. IF you mean the 'jaggies'... those stair stepped edges to lines that happen between fields, then yeah. You'll need to use either "Progressive" or do a "Field interpolation" or "Field doubling" IN your photshop program. Also, I use a plugin for photoshop that I bought online, I'm not at my editing computer. But it does a GREAT job of scaling screengrabs. You can bring them up for nice still photos for press packages and such. I'll dig it up and post it later.