Save a frame from a video

What you get

Each saved frame is a PNG picture the size of your video's shape:

It holds exactly what the preview shows at the playhead: the clip as you framed, turned and colored it, plus any titles and pictures over it. That makes a thumbnail with its title already on it a one-click job. For a clean frame, move to a moment without text, or delete the title, save, and undo. Each file is named after your project and the time of the frame. Saving changes nothing in your project, so you can grab stills in the middle of an edit.

Getting a sharp still

Video frames are made for motion, and a frame from the middle of a quick movement is often blurred. Step through the frames around your moment with the arrow keys; one or two of them are usually crisper than the rest.

Two things limit how much detail the picture can have:

• The size. Frames are saved at the shape's size, so a 4K clip gives a 1920 × 1080 picture, not 3840 × 2160.
• The preview. The frame is taken from what Octoolo plays. Videos in H.264, VP9 or AV1, as most MP4 and WebM files and many MKV and MOV files are, play as they are, at full detail. Others, such as H.265 (HEVC) phone videos, AVI and WMV, play from a smaller copy Octoolo makes, at most 720 pixels tall, so their frames carry less detail. To get full detail from those, convert the video to an H.264 MP4 first (see HEVC to MP4) and add that file instead.

PNG, and turning it into JPG

PNG keeps every pixel exactly, with no compression marks, which is what you want for a thumbnail you will work on further or a still you will print. Its files are larger than JPG: a 1920 × 1080 frame often takes a few megabytes. Where the clip does not cover the whole frame, the video's Background color fills the space, so the picture is never see-through.

If a site asks for JPG, or you want small files to email, turn the PNG into a JPG with PNG to JPG. Or open it in the Photo Editor to crop it, write on it, and export it as JPG or WebP at the size you need. So MP4 to JPG in Octoolo is two short steps: save the frame, then export it as JPG.

For a title on the still, add it in the Video Editor before you save the frame: add text to a video shows the styles. The text lands in the picture exactly as it looks in the preview.

When you need many frames

Save this frame makes one picture per press. For a dozen stills that is quick; for every frame of a clip, or one frame per second of an hour-long video, it is the wrong tool, and Octoolo has no batch frame export yet.

For that job, a tool that works through a whole file is the answer. FFmpeg on the command line saves one PNG per second with ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf fps=1 frame%04d.png, and VLC has a scene filter that writes stills while it plays.

Where Octoolo fits is the deliberate still: the frame where everyone's eyes are open, the exact second a ball leaves the foot, a clean view of a slide in a screen recording. You look at each candidate and keep the right one, instead of taking whatever falls on the second.