How to turn a finished video into Instagram stills and a reel on a Mac

The sizes that matter

Instagram wants 1080 × 1920 for stories and reels, 1080 × 1350 for a portrait post, and 1080 × 1080 for square. Export at those exact pixel sizes and the app won't resample your image. Export anything else and it will — softly, and always in the direction of worse.

The manual way

1. Open the graded export in DaVinci Resolve (or Premiere). Scrub each shot for the sharpest frame — motion blur hides in frames that look fine at speed.
2. In Resolve, grab the frame on the Color page (right-click the viewer → Grab Still), then export the still from the Gallery. Don't screenshot the viewer; you'd lose resolution.
3. Repeat for every shot you want. A two-minute film has thirty or more.
4. In Photoshop, make a 1080 × 1350 canvas, place two or three stills, keep their aspect ratio, export. Then again for square, then again for a reel.

It works. It also takes most of an evening, and by the third layout you're reusing the same frame without noticing.

The automatic way

EasyStills watches every frame of the video, finds where the cuts are, and gives you one card per shot — already showing the sharpest frame of that shot. Nudge to a different frame if the auto-pick isn't the one. Pick the shots you want, choose vertical, portrait or square, and it stacks them at the exact pixel size, framing kept, never stretched. One switch turns the stack into a strip of 35mm film with your credit line along the edge. Build as many layouts as you like from one video; a shot already used elsewhere is flagged so you don't repeat yourself.

Prefer motion over a still? Motion turns the same stack into a short looping reel — each shot plays forward, then back — exported as a silent MP4 ready to post. Export, or AirDrop it straight to your phone.

Limits, plainly: it reads H.264, HEVC and ProRes in MOV or MP4 — graded exports, not camera originals. BRAW and R3D aren't supported.