Make Movie Production Stills with Photoshop & Adobe Premiere

Sometimes, a filmmaker can forget to take important still photos during a movie production. This can become a problem when the movie has to be marketed and sent to film festivals. However, there is a way to get movie production stills from your film. I have been able to obtain some great still images from video footage. This can be done during post-production. The following steps will explain how to produce movie production stills using Adobe Photoshop and Premiere.

Save a video clip as a filmstrip in Adobe Premiere
Locate the scenes where you want your movie production stills to come from. Import these scenes into Adobe Premiere. Once your video clips are inside the editing program, play the video in your source monitor inside Adobe Premiere. Select a short "in" and "out" for the video clip in the area where you want your production still to come from. This should be about one half of a second. If you do not choose a short "in" and "out" marker, your filmstrip will include several frames. You only need two or three good frames to choose from. Once you have chosen the markers, export the "in and "out" section as a filmstrip instead of a movie.

You will then have to name the filmstrip. This can be any name, since the file will be deleted later. Repeat this with each section of your footage, depending on the desire production stills. Choose your best scenes that highlight the key actors. These are usually the best production stills to use. If you do not want to place much emphasis on the actors, choose scenes that will best describe your movie. Close Adobe Premiere after you have selected your clips and exported the filmstrips.

Select a frame from the filmstrip in Photoshop
Open Adobe Photoshop using the standard 620 by 480 image size. Once you have opened the photo editing program, open one of your filmstrip files. The file will open and display numerous frames depending on how long your "in" and "out" points were in Adobe Premiere. Browse through each frame to locate the best image. Select the frame that you like best and crop the picture.

Crop the filmstrip and Save your movie still in Photoshop
Your filmstrip file should now display one frame. Copy that frame and move it into your new Photoshop image space. Close the filmstrip and move, crop or resize your new image frame to meet your needs. There may be black video strips around the edges of your frame. If these black areas are present, you can choose to crop them out of your picture.

Save as a Jpeg Image
You can now save the image as a Jpeg file or other formats, depending on your Adobe Photoshop options. It is best to save these images in several formats to prevent future compatibility issues with distributors, movie websites and film festivals. Repeat this process with the remaining filmstrips. Once you have obtained the necessary movie production stills, move all of the filmstrip files to the trash. These files may confuse you if they remain on your computer. They do not have any further use.