How to avoid a Mr. T beat down or make a clean freeze frame in Final Cut Pro. Whichever.

• Posted By: Tim French
• Posted On: 12:01 a.m. | September 16, 2010

You know how at the end of everyone’s favorite ’80s action-comedy-drama show, the tough guy with the mohawk who drove the van would say how he was glad their adventure was over and that he’d never get on an airplane again — and then the certifiably insane pilot would tell him to stop letting people inject large doses of sedatives into his neck. Then, just as the two of them began a chase that surely would have ended with a smaller cast for next week’s episode, the picture would freeze, locking in the looks on everyone’s faces — for the pilot, horror;  anger for the van driver; and idiot joy for the rest of crew at the brutal beating that was sure to follow.

If I’ve learned anything from shows like “The A-Team,” it’s that if you’re the good guy, you can fire thousands of rounds of ammunition without hitting anything and win the battle, and the only way to stop a hulked-out mercenary from delivering the last vengeance beating you will ever need is with a freeze frame.

So what do you do if you’re editing with Final Cut Pro and you need to create a still image from your video? Well, the answer is the same whether you’re trying for a snappy finale to this week’s episode or you want to highlight that one frame from your vacation video where you can totally see Bigfoot in the background, mocking you.

Step 1: Find the frame you want to freeze and park the playhead on it so that you can see it in the Canvas (or Viewer if the clip is not on your timeline).

Step 2: Under the Modify menu, select Make Freeze Frame…

And there you have it; there is now a freeze frame in your Viewer ready to insert in to your timeline. Done.

But…

But we are in a time of great change in video, and many don’t know about some of the limitations of older video standards. A lot of video nowadays uses the progressive method of displaying frames, as opposed to the older interlaced method. Progressive video displays one complete image every 30^th of a second (one nice and clean frame of video). Interlaced video displays two sequential pictures merged into one image every 30^th of a second, with one picture on all of the odd-numbered lines of pixels and the other on all the even lines; these pictures are referred to as the Upper (Odd) and Lower (Even) fields.

Have you ever paused a VHS tape at a spot where there is a lot of motion and the paused frame seems to jiggle? That jiggle is the two fields that make up one interlaced frame kind of fighting for dominance (a technical term that makes interlacing seem so macho).

So what does this have to do with making a freeze frame? Well, if you make a freeze frame from a progressive source, you get a nice, clean image, but with interlaced source material, you wind up with a freeze frame made of two pictures squished together. These freeze frames are often described as “blurry” or having “jaggies”  and are often referred to as cruddy looking (another technical term). The best way to fix this is to apply the De-interlace filter to your video clip before making your freeze frame. The De-interlace filter essentially strips away one of the two fields, leaving you with something similar to a progressive frame (nice and clean, remember?).

So click on the Effects tab in the browser, open the Video Filters folder and the Video folder inside of that one and drag the De-interlace filter onto your clip. You can also select the clip on the timeline and apply the filter from the menu bar, Effects/Video Filters/Video/De-interlace. Now this will generally take care of the jaggies and similar artifacts, but it won’t do anything for actual motion blur, which is caused by the amount of movement over the time in which the frame is captured. To fix that, you need to shoot with a higher shutter speed, though by this point it may too late for that.

To sum it up, if you want a clean freeze frame from interlaced video, apply the De-interlace filter before freezing it. And if you must travel with Mr. T, let the man take the train.