Screencapping 101

[marycrawford]

For halimede, and anyone else, of course. :-)
I feel sort of embarrassed doing this, because what do I know? But I hope it's helpful, all the same.

1. PowerDVD. This is the program I use to play DVDs on my PC and to make caps with. It's not free, but there's a free trial and other things. (If you want me to elaborate, email me, m'kay? :-)
   
2. I think PowerDVD can probably play other media files as well, but I haven't tried it yet - I've only made caps from DVD's.
   
3. Install PowerDVD, play around a little until you've gotten used to the controls. The 'shuttle' around the play icon is where you control the playback speed: you can play things backward or forward at any speed, and if you play a DVD at half speed it'll even slow down the sound so you get weird low voices.
   
4. Open a file folder (in Windows, not PowerDVD) and make a directory you want to store the caps in.
   
5. Go back to PowerDVD and click on Configuration (Control+C).
   
6. Click 'Advanced...' under Player Setting. Under Default Capture Mode, choose 'Capture to File' and hit 'Browse' to find the directory you just made for your caps.
   
7. In the same window, choose 'Original Video Source Size' if you want to make caps at the original resolution (instead of having bigger but less clear caps when you choose fullscreen).
   
8. Click OK twice to close the window. Now right-click on the player to get the PowerDVD menu: turn Full Screen and Keep Aspect Ratio off. (I'm not entirely sure about that last one, but the caps seem to look better that way.)
   
9. Now you can start making caps.
   
10. Start playing the scene you want to cap, at half or regular speed. Hit the spacebar to pause the screen: hit T to go one frame forward. Now you can pick exactly the frame you want. (Props to dbw who taught me this trick!)
    
11. Hit C to make a cap. If the paused frame looks blurred, your cap will be blurred. If it doesn't look blurred, your cap might not be, but no guarantees.
    
12. I tend to make twice or even thrice as many caps as I need, because some won't work that well or will be blurred after all. Deleting is easy.
    
13. Your caps have now been saved to the folder you made, as bitmaps. Use the excellent free viewer Irfanview (which can also make caps, but I haven't tried it yet) to walk through them and delete the ones that don't work, then you can convert them to .jpg with the same program.
    
14. I don't clean up my caps (cropping, tone, contrast etc) before posting them, because I'm lazy and because I like to have the original settings. But you can do that with Irfanview too: you can even crop or change a whole batch of pics at once.
    
15. If you want to post them to a webpage, use the excellent free converter Thumbawumba to convert bitmaps to .jpgs, make thumbnails and thumbnail gallery pages with one click of a button.