Windows Movie Maker: Taking a Single Frame Picture

Video editing software is often multi use giving options for multiple files to be imported and exported. Though the primary function is for cutting together video sequences you may often want to pull out just a section for different purposes, such as promotional packages. From here you can redefine what the piece of media is used for as a single entity instead of a piece of a larger video. A main form of this is through pulling a single image from your project. Windows Movie Maker has an easy built in feature to take a single frame directly from your project and save it externally as a picture.

When you are editing in your Windows Movie Maker Timeline find the image you want to capture. You have to be exact about this and make sure that the play bar is on the exact frame that you want to extract. You figure this by having it stopped on a specific point in the Timeline sequence according to the image in the preview window. Once you have found the perfect moment as determined by the display in the preview window. Go to Tools in the upper task bar and select ‘Take Picture From Preview’ from the pull down menu. This will then open up a Save Picture As window where you select a name and location to save the picture. The picture will then be saved as a JPG, JPEG, or JPE.

From here you can use the picture file for almost anything, including importing it back into your project if you need to. This is a bit of a difficult project in Windows Movie Maker because you have to get the play bar on the perfect Timeline spot so try to be as accurate as possible. This is somewhat easier to do when playing the clip specifically and only try to do it in the Timeline view instead of the Storyboard one. Do not try to do this on really short clips because it will be difficult maintaining accuracy. The middle of long clips are the easiest to work with for taking a single frame.