High Quality Stills
 

Ok, i dont think its possible, but i hope it is and im just being stupid. is there anyway to get high quality stills from footage shot on the xl1s?

basically what im trying to do is good good looking still shots straight from the movie. but it's pixelated, is it just not possible because of the format of mini dv? or can i do something to make it look good?

anything would be nice know!

What kind of copmuter do you have, and what programs. On the XL-1, a "photo " is 6+ seconds long.
I have down loaded them into my G-4, used iMovie, some results really good others not so good.

Bruce

I suggest that you never use the Photo button, as it ruins the video, and doesn't capture that good a photo. Instead, use Premiere, Vegas, whatever your program, and export a single frame. If you use frame mode on your XL1, I believe it should produce a cleaner image, but I haven't tried it.

One thing to be aware of- Premiere usually tries to save these stills as bmp. Make sure you select jpg or other higher quality format.
Keith

Keith, what do you mean with "it ruins the video"?
Peter

hehe im a new boot, funny, anyway..... i use FCP 3 on a dual 500 G4, and when i export a single frame (i stay away from the photo button myself, its just annoying) it turns out all grainy, i save it in a png format, anywho i will keep experimenting until i finally give up or i find a way!

Riley,
I was doing a bunch of still captures today, 200 of them in fact, and what I did is when you stop the video at the point you want to capture I make a still of that, then I add the de-interlace filter to it, and then export that as a jpeg and go into the options before I export it and put the quality at highest and best depth. Then I export it out, once in Photoshop I make it smaller that the orginal size, any bigger and it looks pixelated, but 4 by 6 inch photo will look decent.

I submitted some jpegs to a magazine and they looked great, they were about 2.5 by 3.5 inches in size. I had to copy the image and change the resolution to 360 dpi, it made the photo smaller but any bigger than 4 by 6 and it will look bad. The photographer for the event, a gothic club event, didn't get any good shots of the two dancers, so I just froze the video when the lights hit the dancers and got some great shots off of the photographers flash. If you want to see the images, I can email you a high rez photo of the magazine layout. You can't tell they were taken from my xl-1.

after reading another thread, I learned that tiff and bmp files will not lose data so the files sizes are bigger, one photo I did came out to these sizes: 208k as a jpeg, 328k as a png, 980k as a tiff, and 1080k as a bmp, so I'm assuming the bigger size files will give a better quality, so maybe jpeg is the way to go when exporting out of FCP.

anyone out there know the best way to export stills? maybe I've been going about it the wrong way!?

Try this for stills in FCP 3
 

Taken directly ffrom the BOSFCPUG forum for starters:

Export your still as a pict file and bring it into Photoshop. Use a pict file because it is the most basic representation of your still, there is (to the best of my knowledge) no compression taking place here. Once in Photoshop, you can do an unlimited amount of things to alter and attempt to enhance your picture, including de-interlace. Just keep in mind that a) your image was acquired at 720x480 NON-SQUARE (D1/DVNTSC) pixels which in photoshop translates to 720x540 square pixels, and b) as a result, it really cant ever get better than that. Now having said that, in certain cases, you can make things look better in Photoshop (like for instance high contrast lines in the frame) using filters and other tools in Photoshop.

Before exporting, make sure youre not doing it to use a tool thats already available in FCP (ie. blurs and color correction.)

update on shooting stills with XL1s
 

I have a project coming up where the client wants an enormis amount of stills, and since this post is a couple of years old now. Has any one came up with the perfect way of getting good quality stills with the XL1s. Use the photo button or grab the frames?