This is my industry help thread, I figure I should do atleast one nice thing before the end of the year.. and it works out since this is my ultimate GFY pet peeve, atleast 1500 people on GFY have asked about screencapping movies, and it is soo damn easy to do. So as a public service announcement and an attempt at contributing to the "adult industry" I'am going to make life easier for you all.
You should bookmark this post, as it will be useful, unlike 98% of most threads.
Keywords for the search feature:
screencapture, screencapping, capture, wmv, mpeg, avi
windows media player, black screen, capturing movies, screengrab, programs and screencapping, capturing wmv movies
mpeg movies, avi movies
Capturing an AVI file..
-This format is not as super popular as it once was, but there are still many situations in which you will need to capture an AVI movie file.. The quality is normally very decent with AVI so your screencapture should turn out decent.
The program I would suggest for this is virtual dub. (Look at the bottom of this thread for a link, it is free)
-Load your AVI movie into virtual dub.
-Hold Shift while moving the right or left arrow keys, this will snap you to certain frames, this is important because often the best screencaps will be found on a frame.. When you find a quality screencapture, Click Video and then ---> Copy Source Frame to Clipboard (as seen below)
Load up your favorite Imaging program, resize the image to the size you need and make sure to Sharpen or lighten the image.. This is the difference between good looking screencaptures and shitty screencaptures.
The Final Result is this.
Capturing an MPG or MPEG file
This process is ultimately the same as an AVI file, however mpeg files are often reduced quality when compared to AVI, so your screencaptures may not look as good. IF you often wonder why the screencaptures on DeluxePass and Adultbouncer look so good, it is because they are ripped into a high quality DVD AVI format.
Load your mpeg file into VirtualDub again, and follow the same process as if it was an AVI.. Here I took a sample movie from Nastydollars and did a screencapture, as seen below, quality is not as great as the AVI
The Final Result is
Capturing a WMV file
This is one of the MOST common questions, people are always trying to capture WMV files using Windows Media Player or any other movie format and they get a Black Screen when they hit Print Screen.. This is not worth the aggrevation and the screencaptures look shitty because you have very little control and 80% of the time, it wont work..
Right now you are probably thinking you can use Virtualdub, but you cant, Microsoft freaked out and threatended to sue virtualdub, because there software was able to Open WMV and convert the formats to AVI, and microsoft didnt like that, so the screencapture utility will not work anymore for WMV files, however if you can find an old version of virtual dub, you can screencap WMV files no problem.
The best program I have found for screencapping WMV files is not free, however it is like next to free (20 bucks or so) It is called SnatchIt (link at the end of this thread)
Using SnatchIt, Load your WMV file
and select the size you would like for the screencapture, when you scroll around, look for a crisp frame and hit Snatch it. This will save it and you can keep going as it saves things numbered.
Here is an example of the software..
The best thing about this software is it has the ability to take as many thumbs as you want from a movie in under 5 seconds, using the autothumbs feature, you just set how many thumbs you want and it captures them to the directory you choose. This is my favorite software of all time, and the kid that makes it is some starving student who is asking like next to nothing for it.
The final piece of software I use is called ScreenHunter 4.0 by wisdom Soft, this is great for screencapping EVERYTHING, you just need to hit F6 or whatever hotkey you define and it takes a screencapture of anything, that is what most people use to screencap browsers, stats, sometimes pics etc.
Anyways, this is my contribution to GFY, this question is honestly asked too many times a week, and I should of solved any questions. I have explained the easiest methods by far. Below you will find links to the software I've mentioned!
Any Questions?
-?Pipecrew
Download The Programs
VirtualDub
Snatch It
ScreenHunter 4.0