In the past I have had a lot of people ask me about how to capture still frames from video files. Now, if you are a professional or student video editor with access to programs like Avid and Final Cut Pro then you probably know a method for doing this already, within those software suites.
However, there is a much simpler, free method of capturing still frames using VLC. If you don’t already have VLC on your computer, download it now (in fact, download it even if you don’t need to grab still frames, it’s a great piece of software).
Still frames can be created in 3 super simple steps:
- Open your video in VLC
- Pause the video on the frame you want to capture
- Click on the Video dropdown menu and select Snapshot*
* the hotkey is “shift-s” by default on Windows, and “option-apple-s” on Mac
You have now created your first still frame. But where is it?
On a Mac it will be saved to the Desktop by default, while on Windows it is saved to the “My Pictures” folder. You can change these defaults in the VLC Preferences menu, which is also where you can specify png or jpg image formats (png is the default).
If you still can’t find the image in either of the above default directories, run a search for “vlcsnap” on your harddrive. This is the prefix VLC uses for all still frame captures.
