5 Ways To Export a Video Frame On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can capture and frame a video and save it as a photo. 

So a common thing you may want to do if you take a lot of video is to grab a frame from a video and then save that as an image. When you do this you have to realize that video resolution is usually lower than photo resolution. So when you're grabbing just a frame of video, even if it is a 4K video, it is not going to be as good as a real real photo. So try to remember to capture a photo when you want a photo. On the iPhone you can even use the Photo Button while you're recording video and you'll get a higher resolution photo that is better than the frame you would get from the video. But let's say that time has passed and you just got video and now you want to capture a photo from a frame in that video. 

The first I'm going to show you is in the Photos App. So you've got the video in your Photos App. Let's go to just my videos here and I've got some sample ones. Let's go to this particular video here. Then let's say I didn't take any photos here. I just have this video. But I would like to have a photo that I can share with people. So find a good frame, like maybe this one here. When selecting a frame always kind of look at the details. Some frames will be blurrier than others. You've got motion going on. You're probably holding the camera in your hands so you're moving a little bit. So you're going to have some very clear frames and some that aren't so good. So look for a really good one. Once you have the one that you're happy with you can do this relatively easy using a Menu item in the Photos App. Just go to File and then Export. When you're viewing a video you'll have this option here to Export Frame to Pictures. Select that. Then it doesn't seem like anything has happened. But it has literally done exactly what it said. It has saved an image file to your Pictures Folder.  So in the Finder go to your Home Folder. Then look for Pictures. This is usually where your Photos Library is kept and these other things as well. Then you'll find an image file right here. You double click it. It should open up in Preview and you'll see you've got that frame now as a photo. Note that it usually captures in the format that is not so great and it is a pretty large file so if you really want to keep this photo you probably do want to open it up in Preview here and then go to File, and then Export and choose a better format. For instance let's choose AGIC here and we see we get a much smaller file. Also while we have it in Preview just use the Info Button here and see that the pixel height and width matches the video. So this is a 4K image and in this case it looks pretty good. I was using a really good camera to capture the video with a big lens so it got a really nice frame here and it is something not quite as good as a regular photo but pretty close. 

Now if you want you can take this file, or better yet the one you exported into AGIC or JPEG and drag this into your Photos Library and add it there. 

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Now what about a file? Say you have a video file not in your Photos App. You can actually grab a frame from this pretty easily. If you double click the video file like this one here in the Finder it should open up in Quick Time Player. Now you can go and find the frame that you want. The same thing here. Look for a frame that is nice and clear with details. When you have exactly what you want you can go to Edit and Copy. Now when you Edit Copy in Photos you actually copy the entire video. But when you do it in Quick Time Player it actually copies just the frame. Now you have something that is in your Clipboard. So, for instance, if you went to another app like maybe Pages or maybe Mail here and did Command V to paste it would actually paste that image. So to quickly turn that into a file launch Preview anyway you like and instead of opening a file, go to File and you'll notice New From Clipboard or just simply Command N and this will create a simple image here in Preview as a new document. Now you can go to File, Save or just Command S and here you can select the file format. So instead of having to save it first in some format you don't want you can save it directly in the format you want like AGIC or JPEG. You can even set the quality here for AGIC or JPEG as well. Now I see my image here. I can Quick Look it there. If I look for the info on this file you can see the dimensions are the dimensions of the video. This is a 1920 by 1080 video here. If I want to add it to my Photos Library then I can simply drag it down and add it to Photos. 

Now another way to do it is to select the frame you want in Quick Time Player. Copy with Command C then go to Preview and create new document from the Clipboard. Instead of saving it here use the Share Button and you can share directly to Photos with the Add To Photos option. Now you've got this image in your Photos Library and you never had to save it as a File. 

An easy way to combine some of these, if your goal is to create a new photo in your Photos Library from a frame in a video, is to start in the Photos App. Go to the video. Don't worry about getting to the right frame. Just go directly to Image and then Edit With and then select Quick Time Player from the list. This will open it up in Quick Time Player without saving a new copy or anything. Now you can find the right frame here in Quick Time Player. Now Command C to Copy, launch Preview and New From Clipboard. Now that you have this image here in the Clipboard, now you can click Share and then Add To Photos. Then you can Close what you have there in Preview. Close what you had in Quick Time Player. You never actually created another file or anything and you have this image right here. The only downside is that if you look at the information here you'll see that this is a pretty large file. You didn't have a chance to save it out as a JPEG or AGIC to make it a more compressed format. 

Now I'm going to show you another method that uses an app that you may not have, Pixelmator Pro. Pixelmator Pro technically isn't a third party app anymore since Apple owns Pixelmator. But it does actually cost some money to buy it. One of the things you can do though is you can work with the video in it. So take the video and drag it into Pixelmator Pro or open it with Open With here and select Pixelmator Pro. You can actually do things with Pixelmator Pro with this, like do filters and things like that and save it out as a new video. But what to show you is how to capture a frame with it, Now there really isn't a good way to select a frame here except to click on the More Button and actually trim the video. But just trim it to get to the frame that you want, like that. Now that you have that frame you can Copy & Paste. But you can't just copy and paste right now. You actually have to do Command A to select All and Command C to copy. This copies the actual pixels here. Now you've got a copied and you can actually paste it into any app you want or just, since you're in Pixelmator already, go to File and then New From Clipboard, and you have a new Pixelmator Pro document that you can now Command S to save and you can send it out in any format you like. But you can also Share and then select Add to Photos as well. This will actually add it to Photos and the Format is actually pretty decent. It is AGIF here and compressed pretty well. 

Now that's probably not the method that most people are going to use but it could come in handy especially if you've used Pixelmator Pro for a lot of things. 

Now this last one I'm going to show is one that I truly dislike. It is to take a screenshot of the video. Now I hate this because it is kind of like making a copy of a copy. You're loosing some resolution. All the other methods I showed you took one pixel from the frame and made it one pixel in the image. But with a screenshot you're basically taking the rescaled version you see on the screen with the pixels looking slightly different than the actual frame of the video and you're creating a completely new image of it. You're loosing some resolution. But sometimes it is not that important. Sometimes you just want a quick snap of a frame in a video just to show somebody something or just to send a quick message to make somebody smile. So in this case you can be in the Photos App, like this. You can find the frame that you want and then you just use the Screenshot Tool. The master keyboard shortcut for that is Shift Command 5 to bring up all the options here. Then it is probably best to use Capture Selected Portion and then you can either draw or adjust what you've got. This does give you the added benefit of allowing you to quickly Crop and Capture part of an image like this. In Options you can set it to Open Up New Document in Preview or go right to an app like Mail or save it as a file on the Desktop or Documents or any other location. You can even have it go to Show Floating Thumbnail and then you can mark it up before doing something else with it. Even if you pick one of these other options the Clipboard Option works if you just do Command C and now you've copied to the Clipboard. So I'm not a fan of that for quality reasons. But I do realize that for a lot of people, in a lot of situations it is a quick and easy way to do it.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.