Convert MOV to TIFF

That is the situation. A retoucher wants a frame to work on, a designer wants a still for a layout, a printer wants something for a page, a compositor wants a reference. All four said TIFF, because TIFF has been the neutral interchange format since 1986 and asking for one is the polite way of saying "not a JPEG".

The word covers an enormous range. A TIFF can be 8-bit or 32-bit, RGB or CMYK or Lab, compressed with LZW or not compressed at all, one page or forty, tagged with a colour profile or silent about it. What comes out of this conversion is one specific point in that space, and whether it is the right point depends entirely on who asked.

Uncompressed 8-bit RGBA, baseline, no profile, no metadata. Four channels, four bytes a pixel, laid out plainly with a header in front of them. It is the most universally readable TIFF that exists — everything from Photoshop to a twenty-year-old prepress workflow opens it without a plug-in.

It is also the least self-describing. There is no ICC profile to say what the colours mean, no EXIF to say where it came from, no timecode, no shot number and no date. The file is pixels and nothing else, which is exactly what makes it interchange-safe and exactly what makes it useless as a record. Both halves are worth knowing before you attach it to an email.

If the request came from visual effects, stop here. A pipeline means 16-bit linear or floating point, delivered as DPX or OpenEXR, ideally out of the grading system with the log or scene-referred values intact. An 8-bit display-referred TIFF has already had a transfer curve applied and has thrown away most of the latitude that makes a plate workable.

It is a genuinely useful file for the other requests. A retoucher building a key art from a frame, a designer laying out a page, a stills desk that needs something to crop — all of those work in 8-bit display space anyway and will be perfectly happy. The distinction costs one question to settle and a re-delivery to get wrong.

Nothing is compressed, so the arithmetic is exact: width times height times four bytes. A 1920 by 1080 frame is 8.3 MB. A 3840 by 2160 frame is 33.2 MB. A vertical 4K clip gives the same 33.2 MB with the dimensions swapped, because the rotation is applied when the frame is read.

It does not vary with the picture. A completely black frame and a frame of a crowded market are the same number of bytes, which is the property that makes uncompressed TIFF predictable and the reason nobody stores libraries in it. Two or three frames go by email; twenty do not, and belong on shared storage.

No profile is written. Anything opening the TIFF assumes sRGB, and your footage almost certainly was not: an iPhone records Display P3, a camera may be in a log curve or Rec.709 or Rec.2020, and a graded master is in whatever the grade delivered.

The fix is a sentence in the email rather than anything in the file. Tell the recipient what the source was and whether the frame is graded, and they can assign the right profile in ten seconds. Without it they will guess, and the guess is sRGB, and a saturated frame will look flat to them and correct to you for the rest of the job.

The pixel count is fixed by the recording. 3840 pixels at 300 dots per inch is 12.8 inches on the long edge — a full magazine page with a little to spare. 1920 pixels is 6.4 inches, which is a half page. At 150 dpi, which is enough for a poster viewed from a metre, both double.

The limit that bites first is usually not the resolution but the compression. Video frames carry blocking and motion smear that are invisible on a moving screen and obvious at A4 on paper, particularly on skin and on flat backgrounds. If the still is going to be printed large and the shoot is still up, take a photograph — most cameras will shoot stills during recording precisely for this.

The single control is the timestamp, in seconds, and a tenth of a second either way changes the result more than any format decision on this page. Video encoders spend their bits where a viewer notices motion, so a frame taken while a subject is briefly still is dramatically cleaner than one taken mid-gesture from the same shot.

Convert three candidates and look at them at full size before you send anything. It costs a minute, and it is the difference between a still a retoucher can work with and one they have to ask you to replace.

TIFF can hold multiple pages and this conversion writes exactly one. Each run produces a single frame at a single timestamp, and getting five means five conversions with five timestamps.

For an actual sequence — every frame of a two-second beat, or a burst around a moment — this is the wrong tool and a desktop transcoder is the right one. Where this page fits is the two or three frames that somebody has actually asked for, on the machine that already has the footage.

The MOV is read, decoded and encoded to TIFF entirely in this browser tab, on your own processor. Nothing carrying the footage goes anywhere, which you can confirm in the network tab while it runs.

On a job that has not delivered, that is the whole argument. The frame you are extracting is often the most sensitive single image in the project — the product, the talent, the location — and the usual route to a TIFF is a converter chosen from a search result that keeps the upload for an unspecified time. There is no reason to take it.