Apple removed one of my favorite features from iMovie a few generations ago. The ability to grab a static frame from a video clip. That’s gone and there’s not an easy way to pull static images from a video file.
That reminds me of another technology I thought was mostly dead. Animated GIF images.
GIF images were one of the web’s first graphic file formats, and advertisers jumped on the technology because GIF images could be strung together in a sequence to create animation.
GIF Brewery is a rather inexpensive Mac app that automatically pulls images from video clips to create animated GIFs.
Drop in a video clip, set a few preferences (looping, frames per second, frame count, delay, etc.), and you’re good to go.
You can also use GIF Brewery to crop or resize video clips, apply Apple’s built-in Core Image filters, and save settings to be used again on another video.
GIF Brewery won’t harm your original movie clip, but it is limited to whatever movie files that QuickTime can open and play.
Pulling static images from photo clips and assembling them into an animated movie is all well and good, but not too useful here in the 21st century. What I’d rather see is a simple tool that pulls an image frame from a video clip in .jpg.