FCP howto: Use Batch Export to create a directory of still frames from a bin of clips
February 3rd, 2010If you’ve got a bunch of clips in a Final Cut Pro Browser window, and you’d like to quickly generate a still frame for each clip, you can use the “Still Image” feature of FCP’s ancient “Batch Export” feature to automate much of the process. Here’s how:
1. Choose a representative frame in each clip. (Click any of these images to see them nice and big.
2. Send the clips to FCP’s Batch Export feature and bring up its “Settings” window.
3. Choose the destination for the exported files and set Batch Export to create still images.
The result will be a folder full-resolution PNG images, each named after its parent clip, deposited in the chosen destination folder.
I often end up processing directories full of such uncompressed images further using the excellent command-line Imagemagick utilities using the tcsh shell’s1 “foreach” command to iterate through all the images.2 It generally goes a little something like this:
$ tcsh3
% cd directory_of_images4
% foreach foo (*.png)5
foreach? convert -geometry 330x800 "$foo" "$foo:r.jpg"6
foreach? rm "$foo"7
foreach? end8
The result of this command is a set of JPEG-compressed images, one per clip selected in step 2, each resized proportionally to fit within a 330×800 rectangle.
- This is also easy to do with OS X’s default bash shell, but I’m more fluent in tcsh. [↩]
- You may prefer GraphicConverter, Photoshop, or MS Paint. Imagemagick combined with the command line is mad fast for both image transformations and automatically renaming files. [↩]
- Switching to the tcsh for this because I have yet to internalize Bash's foreach syntax. [↩]
- If you're unfamiliar with command lines and shells, please note that the "%" character here represents the tcsh command-prompt, the "$" in the previous line represents the typical Bash command-prompt. Don't type these characters in your commands, they're just here for show. [↩]
- "foo" is a placeholder of my choosing. There's nothing special about the string "foo". You can replace it with anything you like, such as "image", "placeholder", or "your_mom". Just make sure to use the same string in place of all the "$foo" commands below. [↩]
- Each time tcsh iterates through your commands, it will replace the string "$foo" with the filename of an image from the set chosen by "*.png", which is every file in the directory ending in ".png". Adding a ":r" to "$foo" indicates that tcsh should expand the filename but leave off the period and filename extension –in this case "$foo:r.jpg" removes ".png" from the file and adds ".jpg" in its place. The quotes around "$foo" are optional if your filenames do not contain spaces or special characters. [↩]
- Removing the original png file because all I ever wanted were the tiny JPEGs. [↩]
- One more note from Captain Obvious: If you try to copy and paste any of these commands, be sure not to copy and paste the superscript numbers that lead to these footnotes. [↩]
