Creating a Still Clip from a Video Clip

Thousands of still images flicker by as we're watching videosometimes too quickly. Perhaps you'd like to linger on a sunset or highlight the one short moment when everyone in your family was looking at the camera. You can create a still clip from a single frame of video. You can also save a frame as an image file on your hard disk.

To create a still clip:

1.	Position the Playhead at the frame you wish to use.
2.	Choose Create Still Frame from the Edit menu, or press Command-Shift-S. A new five-second clip appears on the Clips pane, named "Still 11.dv" or similariMovie sets the number in the title (Figure 9.19).

Figure 9.19. A new five-second clip appears on the Clips pane when you choose Create Still Frame.

To save a frame as an image:

1.	Position the Playhead at the frame you wish to use.
2.	Choose Save Frame from the File menu, or press Command-F. iMovie asks you to specify a file name and a location on your hard disk (Figure 9.20). Figure 9.20. Use the Save Frame command to export a single frame as a still image to your hard disk. Images are saved as JPEG files by default, but you can also choose to save them in PICT format.

Tips

• Remember that you're still working in video resolution, so your still clip won't be the same higher-quality that you'd get by taking a photo using a digital still camera.

• When you import a still photo, iMovie scales it to match the video resolution. So if you bring a picture in from iPhoto and then save a frame of it to disk out of iMovie, the new file will have less resolution than the original photo.