How to capture a Still frame from Imovie 11

There are two approaches. Let's call them the shotgun approach and the rifle approach.

Shotgun approach:
Drag the video clips into an iMovie Project. Then SHARE/EXPORT USING QUICKTIME.
Choose Still image sequence. This will give you 30 jpegs per second for all the clips. In other words, it will give you every single frame, converted to a still.

Rifle Approach:
Download a free app to your Mac called MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5.
Open MPEG Streamclip.
In iMovie, right click on one of the Video clips, and select "Show in Finder".
Drag these clips from the Finder into MPEG Streamclip. You should be able to hit the Play button and see them all.
Move the playhead in MPEG Streamclip to the exact frame that you want. Then click FILE/Export Frame. You can choose whether you want JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. And choose a location. Move the playhead to the next frame you want and repeat.

iMac 24 2.8Ghz, iPhone, TV Mac OS X (10.6.5) Panasonic HDC-SD5 iMovie 11
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The MPEG Streamclip solution is working well for me.

but ALSO APPLE will add this feature soon

Only if someone tells them.

If you want this fixed, you should leave feedback with Apple about this.

iMovies 02 to 09 could do this.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/imovie.html

They NEED to add this feature ASAP

Yes.

When I need stills (or better quality) I use iMovie 06.

The still feature will be added in soon. This was not "intentional", but rather an accidental omission.

Probably intentional

I use still frames all the time.

I need stills for menus, DVD artwork, DVD case artwork.

Also, I think this would've been very easy to incorporate within iMovie 11.

The best thing about iMovie '11 stills is that they now match perfectly with the video frame, so freeze frames are identical to the preceding video frame. Likewise with stills from an Event. This exact match was how things worked with very early versions of iMovie, particularly version 2. But, I found that stills from iMovie HD 6 weren't as sharp or clear, or as saturated, as the video frames they were extracted from.

So, I much prefer the stills from iMovie '11 when adding them to a project. If I need them for other purposes (which I frequently do), I use MPEG Streamclip or otherwise a screen grab in full screen view. With screen grabs, the best approach is to create a new project and add stills from your Event, with each still having the shortest possible duration. Then show that project full screen and grab the stills from the frames using the key combination Command>Shift>4. Use the left/right arrow keys to progress through the project. I get excellent quality stills this way and generally import them to iPhoto for further enhancement, cropping etc. After processing in iPhoto, I often use them in Keynote, then import back to my main project in iMovie '11 for producing a highlights slideshow.

John

John, I did a comparison between Grab and a free app called SKITCH and I find SKITCH to be superior. First of all, the borders of the copy are cleaner looking, more precise. Second, you can write notes in Skitch, draw arrows, draw boxes around significant info, or circles if you prefer.

Also, you can do it in any color you choose. You can also change the size, edit, and reformat to jpeg or tiff or pdf etc etc.

I use it every day. It is the best free app I have.

-Lorna

Thanks Lorna - I will have a look at Skitch, it sounds good! Hope things are going well with your new (now newish) camera.

Skitch doesn't seem to appear on Plasq's website, but there are plenty of references to it elsewhere.

John

John, Skitch does exist because after migrating all my stuff to a new account on my Snowy OS, which was a true headache, I went and downloaded a new Skitch. Here is the URL: Download Skitch for Mac
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/27134/skitch

-L

new account on my Snowy OS

What is a "Snowy OS"?

"Snowy" is short for Snow Leopard. 🙂

Lorna