We will however, address the biggest question we get…”Why shoot on a DSLR?” Well besides the obvious things like lens options, the crazy depth of field, how they perform in low light situations, and how easy it is to travel around with them versus traveling with our normal video cameras. (Sony HVR-Z7U) One of the coolest things we’re proud to be able to do is pull (good) stills from our videos!

Below is a still we pulled right from video on our 7D a few months ago

Now obviously most of you photographers could make this image look ridiculously good, but we’re not photographers, so don’t rake us over the coals too bad:) haha

For the longest time we’ve wanted to be able to post stills, but stills from regular video cameras look horrible. (unless of course you’re lucky enough to be shooting on a RED) We don’t care how good your video camera is, or how cool the moment was; just because you can freeze a frame in your video doesn’t mean you always should!

With that said though, we’ve found that people spend even more time on our blog posts when we do post images.

So how do we get such good stills?
The way we get our stills from our video is actually pretty simple! The first thing we do is find the clip that has the frame we want to freeze.

Most of you who own a DSLR know that bringing in footage right into an editing program without converting the footage is a nightmare. There are tons of programs out there you can use to convert footage, but our favorite is MPEG STREAMCLIP. You can get a free copy here for your heavenly Mac or your windows machine (We’re just being mean by striking out the windows machine, they do have mpeg streamclip for windows)

So once you’ve downloaded MPEG STREAMCLIP and open it up, you’ll get a window like this.

Awww yeah baby:) The process is simple go to [FILE] and click [OPEN FILES] or press [Apple+O] and locate the video file you want to use. MPEG STREAMCLIP will open up your video clip and you’ll have to scroll to exactly where you want the still to be taken at.

Once you’ve found the perfect spot in your video to capture as a video still Click on [FILE] and select [EXPORT FRAME]

Once we get to this window, we make the following selections
Frame size :: Unscaled (You can resize the image later on in simple photo editing software)
Pixel Aspect :: Computer Graphics
Gamma :: 2.2
There is no need to interlace or deinterlace.
We leave the adjustments alone and tweak stuff in lightroom
Format :: JPEG
Quality :: we go all out and move the slider all the way up:)

Click OK and you’re ready to rock!

If you notice in this particular clip, we shot it way underexposed, and there is also something small in the bride’s hair. After bugging the crap out of our photographer friends we figured out how to bring up the exposure as well as get rid of the white fuzzy in our girls hair.
It’s really that simple!

So now how about the videographers who aren’t shooting on DSLRs? First off don’t be that guy/girl who posts stills that look pixelated and crappy! We’re not saying that only videographers who shoot on DSLRs can get good stills, but in comparison DSLRs smoke other video cameras when it comes to video stills! What we used to do before we had our DSLRs was to actually get ahold of the photographer who shot the wedding with us and ask him/her for a few images we could use for our blog post! Most photographers will be more than happy for you to showcase their work on your blog.

Hopefully this has helped some of our other videographer friends who read our blog!