I needed a high quality PNG version of an SVG logo for a ScreenFlow movie because ScreenFlow doesn’t support SVG graphics.

We can use the built in functionality of MacOS to achieve this – QuickLook.

Procedure

My SVG looks something like this (detail omitted):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg width="192px" height="192px" viewBox="0 0 192 192" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
    ...
</svg>

Copy & edit the SVG

Make a copy of the SVG and edit the width & height attributes to be the correct size (otherwise scaling up with just give the image at it’s current size and a white background).

I’m aiming for an 8000px square image, so change width="192px" height="192px" to width="8000px" height="8000px", like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg width="8000px" height="8000px" viewBox="0 0 192 192" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
    ...
</svg>

Note: When scaling down, you can skip this as QuickLook will scale down correctly.

In terminal

Open a terminal & type:

qlmanage -t -s 8000 -o . logo.svg 

Let’s break that down:

qlmanage   \
  -t       \ # displays the Quick Look generated thumbnails (if available) for the specified files.
  -s 8000  \ # the width in pixels
  -o .     \ # output in the same directory
  logo.svg \ # the input file 
  

This will produce an 8000 pixel wide logo.svg.png.

This massive image can now be used in my movie without any scaling issues.