How to Cut a Single Frame

MickB wrote on 3/23/2005, 9:41 AM

I want to cut a single frame from the timeline and use that as a photo. Another words, as the movie is playing, I want it to appear to freeze on a frame for x amount of seconds, then continue to play. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/23/2005, 11:05 AM

One very simple way to do this is to place the cursor on that frame and click the "save snapshot" button in the upper right corner over the preview window. This will let you save a .jpg or .png version of that frame. Drag this frame onto the timeline as a still image.

Depending on which version of Movie Studio / Vegas Studio you are using, you'll want to make sure the picture is saved at full resolution. Either right-mouse-button click on the preview window and check the "display at full size" option, or change the preview quality to "best/full" before saving the snapshot.

MickB wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:49 PM

Great, thanks. I'm trying to learn this program so I can burn a video for a bunch of people by tomorrow.

I have a question though. It appears Vegas Movie Studio has most effects, etc., that I need. I have not tried Vegas 4 or 5 and don't know how much better these are. Any suggestions? One reason I ask is because somewhere on some forum board someone said they heard that VMS has poor DVD rendering and that Vegas 5 was far better. Do you know anything about this? Thanks again.

gogiants wrote on 3/23/2005, 12:56 PM

Vegas 5 has more DVD rendering choices than does VMS, but that doesn't necessarily mean that VMS's DVD rendering is "poor".

The most current VMS version has only one bitrate choice for creating MPEG-2 files (the format used on DVDs). I don't recall the exact bitrate. If you use DVD Architect Studio you can change the bitrate, and make high-quality files. The tradeoff is that if you change things on your DVD, then you have to re-render, which can be time-consuming.

Some people get up in arms about bitrates, but in my experience most people really can't tell the difference once you get above some baseline acceptable bitrates. The files created by VMS are above that baseline.

If you're immediate goal is to produce something quickly, you'll be better off sticking with VMS than trying to install and use Vegas.

MickB wrote on 3/23/2005, 1:22 PM

Thanks. I'm trying VMS, EditStudio, and the light version of Adobe Premier. Have not messed with the latter two much but liking VMS so far. Don't know how the other two stack up to VMS. Once I decide, I'll purchase one but might consider Vegas 4 or 5. I will use it mostly to capture lots of older 8mm analog video tape to DVD.

Steve Grisetti wrote on 3/24/2005, 1:03 PM

If all you're doing is capturing analog video (like 8 mm) to DVD, you may be better off working with a program that converts directly to MPEG.

Video editors, like Vegas, work best with DV-AVI files but, unless you're going to use this program for all it's worth, why add the extra file conversion (from analog to digital AVI to MPEG)? Keep it simple, and consider a set-up like the SWANN SW-X-DVDE or the Plextor ConvertX.

The editors that come with these kinds of hardware are usually pretty basic and you probably won't be able to edit the files they create in Vegas, but these hardware/software set-ups are the shortest distance between two points if that's the way you want to go.