What's the best way to make a still image from a movie file? I need it high quality

I have a movie file which is a low quality footage. The film has a few photos that I wanna use as photos. I made freeze frames in FCP 7 and exported them. I wonder if there is another way.

What's the best way to make stills from a movie file?

oxband said:

I have a movie file which is a low quality footage. The film has a few photos that I wanna use as photos. I made freeze frames in FCP 7 and exported them. I wonder if there is another way.

What's the best way to make stills from a movie file?

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Hello Oxband - the statement in bold above may be a problem for you, i.e. what does 'low quality footage' mean, e.g. is this VGA (480x640 pixels) or better? The quality of a print at the standard 300 dpi is dependent on the number of MP in the original image used; plus, if a poor quality low-MP video frame is used, then trying to 'upscale' the quality will be limited.

As an example, I took a HD video (1080x1920) of my neighbor's house on my iPad Air 2, did a frame screen capture and then AirDropped both that and the actual movie to my laptop - imported the latter into Photos and also made a 'frame capture' (as explained previously) - the two images are shown below w/ their 2.1 MP sizes, so either way produced the same quality image. The following pics below are charts showing the number of pixels needed to make good to excellent 300 dpi prints of various sizes - if the frame captures you are obtaining (regardless of the method) are less than 2 MP (see the circled MP numbers and the tiny size of a good quality print), then you will not be able to obtain a decent, say 5"x7" or larger print. Dave
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Can't iMovie do this very easily?

ScaryFatKidGT said:

Can't iMovie do this very easily?

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Well, our OP has not returned for a month - of course, there are plenty of ways to 'grab' a frame capture - but, I believe the problem is the original video is of low quality, and Oxband wants a way to improve the quality of the captures which just may not be possible, as I've discussed in my post. Dave