Still Images from Final Cut Express: trying to imitate Walter Murch
 

Just finished reading Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain Using Final Cut Pro. Awesome book. I liked how Murch used stills from each shot to build a kind of "after-the-fact" story board. Looks like a grreat tool when trying to sort through a huge amount of footage.

Does anyone know of an easy way to get stills or snapshots, one for each clip in a project? I've been using shift-command-4 to copy images from the canvass to my desktop, but you'd think there would be an easier way.

I haven't used FCE too much, but I think it has a still-image export option much life FCP's. It's in the file menu, and it might be under Quicktime Conversion - I don't know the menu structure in FCE. If you can find the QuickTime export then just switch it from video to still image. I have the best results exporting as a PNG and then using the de-interlace filter in Photoshop to tone down the nasty artifacts.

There are several answers to your question, any of which I give are just one of many ways or possibilities to story board with final cut.

1) most obvious... story board within final cut itself. Use iconized clips rather than listing. If you name your clips and have a thumb nail of what they are you can arrange them in a bin similar to a story board.

2) How about making a 1 frame long freeze frame of each shot you want, putting them in a sequence, deinterlace them all, then export as an image sequence. Then import into photoshop and you'll have all the "snapshots" individually loaded there to tweek or just print out.

3) when the viewer or canvas is at the frame you want to make a "snapshot" of, make sure that viewer is the active browser (click it with your mouse...), then export as png as Zach was saying.

The list can really go on for a while. Frankly i'm going with your method from now on... Its the fastest way to do things especially just for a "snapshot." If you already know what snapshots you want and how many from which clips you need though i would definately concider option 2 as stated above it really saves some time.
Who knows... the choice is your, hope something i said helped.
Take it easy,
Nevin

Thanks guys. I was hoping to find something fairly automated.

I'm gearing up for a 230-mile kayak sojourn. We expect to be on the water 8 to 10 days. Three still cameras & one video. Part of the logistics is planning battery recharge stops! On return I hope to have a thousand stills to sort through plus many hours of video footage.

We’re doing trial runs with our boats and camera gear and it seems only prudent to start planning on how to organize the editing process.