Getting a Screen Grab of a Video Clip

Simple Keyboard Maestro Action to Video Clip

March 6, 2020 by cryan.com

The best way that I have found to grab a snapshot from a video clip is to use Quicktime Player.

I have found that using the Copy Command is the best way to get an image. Simply paste the image in Affinity Photo or PhotosScape X and your done.

The problem comes if you want to grab multiple shots. It's a lot of work to copy/paste the image.

Keyboard Maestro

That's when Keyboard Maestro comes in handy. It's a quick setup that works every time.

First I created the group called Quicktime so that any Macro in the group will only run when I am running Quicktime:

Then I created simple Macro:

Screenshot of my Macro in Keyboard Maestro

Here's what happens, anytime you Copy a movie clip in Quicktime Player a new file gets created on the Desktop. The file has a unique name.

This is the file location I used, you can simplify this to match whatever format you want:

Obviously you can change this to copy the image to where you want, and change the format to match whatever type you want - PNG, TIFF, JPEG, BMP or GIF.

This works fine Quicktime Player as the only thing I would every copy in the Clipboard would be an image. Otherwise, I would have to add a condition to check to see if the clipboard content has an image.

The nice thing about this solution is that it works for any video types. I have found that other applications, will downsize 4k Videos.