Taking stills from HV20 footage
 

I'm trying to get some decent quality stills from some video footage I shot with the HV20. Now I tried pulling stills from my editing program, but the image quality is not up to par. I read somewhere that you could play back the video in the HV20 and take stills using the photo button on the camera... but apparently you need a mini-sd card to do this. I'm going to try this as soon as I get ahold of a mini-sd card, but my question is, will this method yield better results than taking stills from an editing program? And is there a better method I could use to take stills that will give me better quality images?

You can capture stills to the msd card while you are shooting, but it interrupts the video, unlike some other cameras. There are quality settings in the menu that let you adjust resolution and such for still capture, you would want the highest quality ones...

If you are capturing from your video on the timeline, and if you were in HDV mode, you should be able to make decent still captures from your edit program if you are editing the full res video capture, we do this frequently.

Failing that, there is a trick that our friends over at Miami Channel 4 use, which is to blow the image up as big as possible on a high-res video monitor and do a screen capture of that with a screen-capture program, if all else fails...this assumes that the quality problem is not motion blur or whatnot...you have to have a good frame to work with...HTH /Battle Vaughan/miamiherald.com video team

There's another option if you have Nero. Play the file in Nero Showtime. Stop on the frame, right click on the video window and select capture the frame. This will work for any versions of Nero from 6 onward. Don't know about earlier versions.

In Vegas, you can click on the "disk" symbol in the preview window, and save what ever shot is showing the preview screen. Just set the preview window output to hightest level of output, or otherwise you will get reduced image quality.