From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Exporting a still image - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

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Exporting a still image

- In this chapter it's all about exporting, or as we like to say in Final Cut Pro X, sharing our projects with the world. We're going to start by exporting a still, from this Chapter 13_1 project. If you have access to the exorcize files, it's going to be found in the Projects events. And, for a still, or for all exporting options, we can find them available under the File Share menu. And if you take a look at the default list, you'll see that there isn't an option here specifically for working with stills. But what we do have an option is to add an additional destination. We'll go to the Destinations tab, which is actually part of your Final Cut Pro preferences. So if you went to the Final Cut Pro menu, and went to Preferences, you could also head to this tab, and add additional destinations from this list here. So here are the preset destinations. I have a few extra ones that I've downloaded. But what we do want to keep in mind is that we do have an option here from the destination list to save a current frame. What I want to do is select this Save Current Frame, and add it to the top of the destinations list, which is now going to appear under the File Share menu. Let's rename this by double clicking on the name field. And we're going to call this PSD still. Once I've entered that, I'm going to then choose the type of file I would like under the Export menu. That's going to be the Photoshop file. And by default it's going to scale the image to preserve aspect ratio. Now once we have added this setting, or destination, to the side bar here, we can close this window. Let's now navigate in our project timeline to the still that we want to save. And this is going to be on the fifth shot of your timeline. Right when the female protagonist looks up at the male protagonist here. That's about ten seconds and four frames. I'm going to head to the File menu, we'll go to Share, and let's just choose the PSD still that we added from the add destination menu. We'll get a screen here where we are ready to share, and it will basically show us the still that we are currently over with our play head. We can add a few things, in terms of description, I'll basically say "still for movie cover", in this instance. And we can add additional tags or metadata here to basically discover the still. Now if we head to the settings tab, we can change the type of still that we're exporting if we want to, away from the Photoshop file, but we're good right now. And then once we click on Next, this is going to allow us to choose where on our system we want to save. So we'll head to the Desktop, I'll create a new folder called FCPX Exports. With that folder selected, save this as Movie Still. Once I choose Save, Final Cut Pro is going to save this out here in the background. We can see this here in the Background Tasks menu. If I look under here, the sharing options. It happens so fast that we didn't actually get to see the entire process, but the background task will let you know what it's doing to export out your file there, in the background. Now if I close this menu, let's head to our desktop through the finder. And I'll go to the FCPX Exports, and we can see that Movie Still.psd file has been saved. Now I press the space bar and you're able to see this, if you can't see this for any reason, you want to just make sure that you have Adobe Photoshop installed on your system in order to see that still. So there you have it, how to export a still from Final Cut Pro X.

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