Can You Pull Stills From My Footage?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. ANSWERS.
While the simple answer is "Yes" we can pull still from your footage, we have some tips and things to consider ahead of time!
Video Transcript
Hey, everyone and welcome to another edition of Lights. Camera. Answers. My name is Josh Kuss and I'm the Production Manager here at PEG. Today we're answering the question "Can you pull stills from my footage?"
So, yes absolutely we've done this several times in the past, where we take and scrub through your footage frame by frame grab the stills you like export them as a high resolution image and send them off your way.
There's a few things I would ask that you keep an eye out for though. One big note to just always keep in mind when doing things this way is that you are limited to the resolution that we captured the footage in, right? So, if we shot something in 1080 your stills are going to be 1080. If we shot something in 8K, you're still going to be 8K. This only really matters in a world where you're trying to use these stills for something like print where the resolution is actually extremely important for clarity.
Another big thing to keep in mind is we are you know shooting these things purposely for video so you don't have as much control of the lighting and things like that. And if you had a dedicated stills person on site, which I do always recommend, you would actually be able to light these the way you want and get these stills in a much higher quality way.
The third thing I would mention is when pulling stills from video, shutter speed is something you always have to keep in mind. At PEG, we shoot things typically in a pretty cinematic format and that means we're shooting at 24 frames per second most often. And the reason we do that is it induces a very natural amount of motion blur on the subject. So if I'm moving my hands like this the whole time and you try to go frame by frame through it and pull a still, my hands may be blurry, because we're we're doing that intentionally for the style. So, anytime your subject's moving, you kind of have the concern that you it might look like you made a mistake you pulled an image that looks almost out of focus. So, something to keep in mind is if you're shooting things in that shutter speed, try to only pull stills from things that are sitting pretty still like an interview angle or your video portraits or things like that. Avoid pulling things that are moving around pretty heavily like your b-roll.
So, overall, yeah we can definitely do it. Again, I heavily recommend that you would just add a crew member to these kind of shoots who is just a dedicated stills person and they're setting up their shots and making sure everything looks nice, because at the end of the day that's going to get you an overall better product at the end of the day.
If you guys like content like this, check us out at prittentertainmentgroup.com as well as following us on all of our socials and I'll see you guys next time.
