iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Exporting a Still Frame

The still-frame feature is primarily designed for adding still shots of your footage within iMovie. But you may sometimes find it useful to export a frame to your hard drive as a graphics file—for emailing to friends, installing on your desktop as a background picture, posting on a Web page, and so on. An exported frame also makes a neat piece of "album art" that you can print out and slip into the plastic case of a homemade DVD.

The Resolution Problem

It's worth noting, however, that the maximum resolution for a standard-definition digital video frame—the number of dots that compose the image—is 640 across, and 480 down. As digital photos go, that's pretty pathetic, on a par with the photos taken by some cameraphones. One-third of a megapixel is a pretty puny number compared with the shots from today's five-, eight-, and ten-megapixel cameras. High-def video produces better stills, but it's nothing like what you'd get from a digital camera.

The low resolution of the video frame is only half the reason your captured pictures look so bad. Most camcorders capture images the same way television displays images: as hundreds of fine horizontal stripes, or scan lines. You don't actually see all of the scan lines at any one instant; you see odd-numbered lines in one frame, and even-numbered lines in the next. Because the frames flash by your eyes so quickly, your brain smoothes the lines together so that you perceive one continuous image.

This system of interlacing ...