Sunday, September 03, 2006

How to make a screencap of a movie!!

Well a few days ago i was searching the internet for few english movies,and found some good ones.Along with the movies i saw some nice sample of the movie(preview)and some excellent quality Screenshots.They were really cool and i searched on how to make one.After a search of two days i found a easy and and a handy way on making screenshots.Here we go....

TUTORIAL:

Initially you need two things before you can proceed...
1. ImageGrabberII - A brilliant program,helps us to capture screenshots.You can
get it HERE.

2.A free image host - I use imageshack.us..but you can use flickr or any image hosting sites.

Creating ScreenShots:

To get started Open up the ImageGrabber and open up the movie from the file menu.The movie will start playing,now press the button thats look like a monitor and you will get a window as shown...




Enter the number of screens shots you would like to take of the scene. A good number for a scene is probably about 10-15 and you can have a play around with this and the number of columns explained in the settings below to see what you like.

When you click OK it will go through the movie taking the screen shots and add them to the timeline across the bottom.

You can add individual selected screenshots by using the scrollbar to move to the picture you want and clicking the button next to the you used for screenshots to add the current image at the end of the timeline.

Once you have all the pics you want you can arrange the screenshots in the timeline.


* Right click a screenshot to delete it, delete all or change the text label.

* Left click a screenshot to drag it to where you want in the timeline.

ImageGrabber settings

Once you have all the screens you want, on the File menu click Save File and you will see the following default settings dialog box ...



Layout: Good idea to make the dimensions of each screen (Tile) a fraction of the original to avoid distortion.

Style: Details of the drop shadow around your screens and the background color for your image.

Info: You can include the time each sample was taken in the vid.

JPEG: You can adjust the quality down to reduce the file size say for a full movie with many screens.

Details: You can include the basic movie statistics in the image.

There are plenty of possible configurations, try playing around with different settings until you find a layout you like.


Click the save button and using the Default settings will produce an image with a layout similar to this ...




Once you have your image you may want to resize it or modify it in some way, a nice free and easy to use image viewing/editing tool is irfanview -you can get it here.(This step is optional).


Now you have your screenshots, the next step is hosting your cool new image.

2. Hosting screenshots

The are a few free image hosting web sites around and most of them operate the same way. As i said you can use imageshack.us or flickror any one of the free image hosting sites.

Thats the tutorial, hope you found it useful.More intrestiting facts coming up on the next post!!

Taggies:screencaps
screenshots

by siddharth at 11:03 PM |