iMovie 11 does not allow the capture of a still from video

but physical possesion is becoming less-and-less fashionable.

Anyone who owns an iPhone, iPad, or iPod already know and trusts this upgrade system.

This is something they should have fixed from day one

As far as them watching, I certainly can't vouch either

It would absolutely amaze me though that the app developers and their underling employees would not be trolling here to get input and reflections on their work.

YO! Paul Ramsay! YOU DA MAN! THe MPEG Streamclip works perfect! Hey everyone using iMovie '11 who wants to capture still frames, but learned that you CANNOT CAPTURE STILL FRAMES IN IMOVIE '11, MPEG Streamclip is the solution. Freeware download. I got mine from CNET. Just open your video in it, find the frame you want and "export frame" as a jpeg to your desired location. Took me like 10 seconds, and it's free. Great solve Paul Ramsay. The lack of this feature in iMovie '11 is mind-boggling, but like you said, at least there is a no-cost, good-quality, user friendly fix. This was very helpful as I'm working on creating a diet and exercise video using iMovie and iDVD, and I need many stills from the video. Thanks again! MPEG STREAMCLIP IS THE SOLUTION HERE EVERYONE.

I thought I would post on here to confirm that "Command + Shift + 4" is the best workaround for this missing iMovie 11 feature.

It will turn your mouse into cross hairs and you can drag a selection around the video still you'd like to be your image. It will save to your desktop where you can drag it wherever you wish.

Perfect for me when I want to drag clips from my video to be used in iDvD.

Combined with Full Screen Playback the Command+Shift+4 is what I have used to get as large a screenshot as possible before re-using it in other applications.

Thanks, Paul, for the comment. I was frustrated trying to capture stills from a recent video and did not like the processes that I found in my web searches. Found your post on the forum and now all is groovy. Thanks for taking the time to share.

This was equally frustrating for me so I appreciate the efforts of the folks on the post. I know this is a workaround, but I was playing the movie on my iPad and realized if I paused the movie and waited a second for the play/pause controls to go away, I could do a screen grab from the iPad. (hold the power key and hit the home button, in case you didn't know)

Picture looks great and it took about 3 seconds!!

-T

I tried several of the suggested routes, and I found this to be the fastest, easiest way to go. I couldn't get Grab to get a photo without the controls on the screen. MPEG Streamclip does exactly what iMovie 11 should do as a matter of course!

that feature is on imovie 11 you should just be able to right click on the clip and click add still

Yes, but then where is the JPEG file? A clip appears on the Project timeline, but I can't find source. You used to be able to right click the clip and see the source file.

Why not do a screen capture? Shift Command 3 for the whole screen or Shift Comman 4 for a selection of the screen.

I made a short video tutorial for how to capture a still frame from iMovie using MPEG Streamclip.

Stills grabbed from compressed video files, such as MPEG-x, are generally inferior to stills captured directly from the camera - and here's why:

All video compression schemes base their algorithms, in part, on motion that is occuring from frame to frame. That is, the individual frames that you see when parsing a compressed video file have been created (during recording) to trick your brain in certain ways as you see the frames fly by (during viewing). And even when there is no motion, compression algorithms may alter individual frames, because there is only "so much" that the eye and brain can process at X-fps. And so sophisticated compression schemes "throw away" or alter those pixels that "you" would not take notice of anyway. We've all seen those psychological art objects, that trick the brain. MPEG-4 goes deeper into this psychology than does MPEG-1, which is one reason that -4 compression is more compact.

When you have no other choice but to grab stills, search for segments where motion is minimized. But, beware, the compressor may have fuzzied grandma's brooch in that wedding video, because it has guessed that your brain would not have seen it anyway, when viewing those frames in video form.

FYI: Psycho-acoustic coding is accomplished in much the same way as video when deriving MP3 and AAC files: The compressor throws away notes (at their loudness) which the brain would not hear anyway in the music stream - given what is occuring and what is about to occur in "nearest neighbors". But when taking a shorter time slice of the music in isolation, your ear might actually hear those notes.

DOES ANYONE KNOW OF A GOOD CAMERA FRAME GRABBER? Hopefully shareware of course. This is not rocket science, and it looks like Apple could include this with their OSX, given that so many people would like to do it... I have a video camera on my microscope, and I simply would like to grab a still of some bacteria. Yes, the movie is not too bad, but I can do better with just a "camera shot" - with no compression.

The previous post mentioned Mpeg Streamclip. This works great; wouldn't that do the job for you. Here's the link.

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html