Rob Finch sent me this email and I thought it would be great to post my answer here and provide a quick tutorial for those facing this scary but fun time of being handed video cameras. So, here it goes…
(email reprinted with permission)
Hi Richard, I am not sure that we [...]
Rob Finch sent me this email and I thought it would be great to post my answer here and provide a quick tutorial for those facing this scary but fun time of being handed video cameras. So, here it goes…
(email reprinted with permission)
Rob
It is true that Leeson and his son Leeson II have perfected the process of the HD frame grab, allowing images to be sized close to 100 megabytes (don't quote me on the size, but it's huge.) In fact, it's large enough to have the frame grabs be published in a coffee table book that Dallas produced on Katrina. I have seen the results of their process and it is amazing. I asked David to post something here in the future. He is working on it. Maybe he will talk about the process. I think they need to bottle and sell it. I'll be the first to buy it.
As far as our process at the Merc, we do the basic frame grab with no special mojo and we run images up to six columns. Many of you at the NPPA summit in Tampa this year saw the actual paper examples that I brought with me and can attest to the quality of the images for the newspaper. HEAR ME LOUD AND CLEAR, FOR THE NEWSPAPER! I am not trying to start a religious war here. Really, I have been approached and nearly attacked recently for even mentioning this process of frame grabs and my transition from still to video only. There are some seriously scared and negative newspaper photographers out there, fighting this tooth and nail. All I can say is good luck!
Ok, that said, you will not be able to print these frame grabs (without the Leeson method) 11×14 and hang them on your wall, but for your job at the newspaper, this process rocks. I used to go out with a Mark II, Sony PD100 and a digital voice recorder and TRY to produce multimedia. It was bad, very bad. But now I leave the office with ONE tool and I am able to feed the print and web monster.
So if you have an HD camera and you want to know how to get a .jpg for publication in your newspaper or in your SoundSlide project here goes…
- Open iMovie.
- Import your video.
- Scrub your play head to the desired frame.
- Go under the File menu and choose Save Frame.
- Save the image.
You now have a 6 megabyte .jpg ready to be opened in Photoshop, Soundslides or any other program. At the Merc we just send this file to our Pressroom. The only thing they have used when they think it is necessary is Noise Ninja or Genuine Fractal. That's it. Tomorrow's front page looks like this:
Now, we are just migrating, slowly from iMovie to FinalCut Express. So far, this is how we do it, but if anyone knows a better way, please share.
- Open Final Cut, import your video.
- In the preview window drag your scrubber to where you want the still.
- Choose Make Freeze Frame from the Modify pull-down menu.
- Create a folder in your bin called 'stills' and drag the new freez frame from the preview window in the folder you just created.
- Now click on the image inside your folder and choose Export Using Quicktime Conversion.
- It defaults to a .mov file, just click on the movie Options at the bottom and change the settings to Still Image, then click on the Options button again and choose the file type.
You're done. Please if anyone has a better way, please share, because we are just flying buy the seat of our pants through this process.
tnxs,
-r
10 Responses
Just a heads-up: depending on your version of Photoshop, you may have to deal with “pixel aspect ratio.”
A frame from the camera comes out at 1440X1080 pixels — but it’s squeezed. You may have to resized the image to 1920×1080 to get the picture to be the right aspect ratio.
By the way, Dallas does its frame grabs by doing a screen grab off of a large monitor.
THANK YOU Chuck, I forgot to mention that.
And I also understand Dallas has moved away from that process.
Do you know why that would get you a better still? Does it need to be an HD monitor?
-r
I think Dallas’ screen capture approach avoids the de-interlacing, aspect ratio and color issues that you’d have with grabs from your edit program. I haven’t talked to Leeson II about it, so I don’t know the details but Leeson the Elder did tell me it was a hardware-dependent approach, so I think the monitor has to be big. I think the big advantage is that it’s really quick to do. I didn’t know they were moving away from that, but if they’ve put in more edit stations, they might not all have the same screens.
I do grabs from Final Cut by scrubbing to the frame I want, then directly doing the export/quicktime conversion/still frame. Then pull that file into photoshop, de-interlace, change the aspect ratio and correct color in that order.
You can choose whether to use upper or lower frame when you’re doing the grab and that can minutely change the moment in time you’re capturing. Your grab won’t necessarily match exactly what you saw on the monitor.
The quality is pretty good.
Chuck
Hi Richard:
Thanks for posting this and taking us through your workflow. I’m one of those somewhat “scared” newspaper shooters, but by the same token, am interested in how this stuff works. I had no idea it was so simple!
I have a quick question, one I hope isn’t too stupid. One thing I’m told with these frame grabs, especially with wider shots, is that the depth of field is incredibly high. Sure, sometimes that’s a great thing, but I wonder if it can also over-emphasize busy backgrounds.
Any truth to that? If so, have you found that it’s changing your framing in any way to compensate? And what about cropping into these frame grabs? Do the images hold up?
Thanks in advance for your answers. Hope the questions aren’t too much of a deviation from your original points.
Cheers,
- gerry -
yes, you are right about the DOF in wide shots. there have been many a forum thread started by independent filmmakers wanting to use this camera for productions and unhappy with this feature.
it doesn’t bother me much, it actually makes me frame things cleaner, which always makes a better shot anyway.
in terms of compensating i know there are a few “lens-tricks,” but haven’t looked into them, if someone does, please share.
again, images don’t hold-up that well to cropping. but that has made me a better shooter…something like, ‘if your images aren’t good enough you aren’t close enough’…..
i know these are all things that will get better over time as sony and canon keep rolling out new models.
hpe this helps.
tnxs,
-r
What model of video cameras are you using for your daily work?
our staff uses sony Z1U and sony A1U.
We use a Canon XH A1. We can shoot stills on the fly as we shoot our video or during playback we can grab a frame. The images are saved to an SD card. –John
[...] bonus: All my old links to Koci’s posts work again! Three cheers for persistent URLs! Sample: HD Frame Grab l How To. This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008, at 9:53 pm and is filed under journalism, [...]