Q: how to capture stills in QuickTime 10.0?

Move your mouse away from the player window and the player controls will disappear.

Command-shift-4 keys will turn your cursor into "crosshairs" that you can drag across the QuickTime X window.

It's been a while since I last used the first version of QuickTime X (Snow Leopard) so I may be of no help.

In Lion and Mountain Lion moving the cursor away from the window removes the QuickTime controls. To get larger screen captures enlarge the Player window before Command-Shift-4.

I can't find a way to do it beyond screen capture of my laptop.

The screen capture option is, more or less, the de facto method for capturing a QT X video frames. (Fortunately, as QTKirk indicated, the process is somewhat more evolved in Lion and Mountain Lion.) As for Snow Leopard, my preference and recommendation would be to use MPEG Streamclip's "Export Frame..." File menu option since it offers more features/export options.

I also don't know how to get the controller bar off of my QT window.

The current method of removing the control bar in QT X under Mac OS X v10.6.8 is depicted in the "ScreenFlow.mov" file found on the following URL:

http://downloads.walker4.me/downloads/Temporary.html

Since I did not include an audio track for the above "quickie" move, here is a desciption of the workflow used:

1) Open your movie in the QT X player and scub the playhead to the frame you want to capture and hover the mouse cursor over the display screen are.

2) Without movie the mouse pointer, mouse click the display screen once and only once to fade the controller bar. (Do not double-click the display as this will begin playback of the movie and do not move the mouse cursor or it will reactivate/recall display of the controller.)

3) Immediately use the Command-Shift-4 keyboard shortcut to enter the Screen Capture mode as you normally would.

4) Now press the space bar once to switch to the "Object" image capture mode.

5) When the camera icon appears, immediately click the mouse to capture the frame image without the controller.

Another method of removing the controller bar in Snow Leopard/QT 10.0.

You could use the Secrets Preference Pane ( http://secrets.blacktree.com/ --link at top right of page ) to modify the behavior of QT 10.0.  In Secrets pref pane, untick this QT Player option: Autoshow titlebar/controller.  Then, after a brief appearance at each QT launch, the controller (and titlebar) will disappear (and not come back), but you can still scrub through the video by click-dragging the mouse in the area where the controller used to be or by using arrow keys.  It's a weird way to use QT 10.0, but it does take that controller off the screen.

Freeze the video at the frame of interest.  Edit > Copy.  Next, open Preview and use File > New from Clipboard (Cmd - N).  This will paste the still image into a new document that you can save as you wish.

I like the last post.  I've been doing that since version 7 of quicktime.  Once in preview, save as TIFF uncompressed.  Then you can even make any edits to sharpen it up, and clean it, before compressing back to JPEG.

For a single frame grab, it's amazingly accurate, and actually captures the size of the frame you have, not the pixel size of the video.  You can enlarge the video to whatever size you want (double, half etc) and still get excellent frame grabs.  If there was a way to Automate this function for the services menu in QT, it would really be awesome.  Maybe an applescript to capture the current frame.  IF there were a way to run that action several times, it would be even more awesome.  I shoot video of birds and try to capture their motion in stills, but if I could use higher quality frame grabs in quicktime, it would be much easier to study their behaviors and techniques for flight, etc.

that's how Edward Muybridge established that horses have all four hoofs off the ground at one point when they run.

thank you to you and mfaasse for the screen capture tip