Video Screenshots
 

How the hell can I get them?

alt + print screen isn't working.

Open up two copies of Media Player. The first one will use "overlay mode" (you can't take a screenshot), but the second one you can.

There are more ways to do it, but that's the easiest.

and that i didnt know about

thnx :)

Hey Fletch how on earth do you manage to open 2 instances of windows media player?

Oh btw, if your doing lots of screencaps, get virtualdub + adobephotoshop, CTRL 1 takes the screen cap, you hit back and forward in virtualdub and its super easy to find the pic you want. You can even run a macros so you can hit 1 button and it will take the screencap, jump into adobe, place the image then jump back to virtualdub (use ezmacros).

If your after just 1 screencap per movie you can try fletchs suggestion if you can get 2 running it sounds good. Also if you goto windows media (options) turn off the video acceleration and then you should be able to take screencaps from windows media player movies.

http://www.videocharge.com

Video Charge will take screencaps at specified points in your movies. Costs $30 or so and is definitely worth the $$$.

The VirtualDub+Photoshop option would me my second choice.

Yeah, turning off acceleration is one of the other ways I was referring to. I know I've done two copies of Media Player before, but you can do it with any two different programs that try to play video. It deals with how the video is sent to the video card. There are also a bunch of programs to do it. I've got a little script on my server that just parses through MPGs or WMVs and grabs a single frame and composites it with a Media Player "skin" to look cool :)

There was also a program named something like Movie Magic ++, (I remember the two + signs at the end, and the 2nd word was 99% magic).. It has a thumb preview of entire folder ability, and all you have to do to get the thumbs is to set their size/quality, right click and export. really cool.
I had a trial version installed but I lost it when I formatted my hdd. Check on download.com or similar places..

This is a good program if you don't want to do it manually.

http://theedgeofforever.com/ $15 well worth it.

TMPGEnc grabs great screen caps from vid files -- and it's free :) Aside from being able to copy and paste screen caps into your favorite image proggie, it does a shitload of other things. Definitely worth the download.

To grab screen caps, open the video file in TMPGEnc, then choose the checkbox for "source range".

You'll then see the first frame of the video file, and be able to scroll frame by frame until you find the right place you want to make a screen cap of. Then just right-click on the main preview panel up top, and choose to copy the image to the clipboard.

Then open up photoshop, or any other image editing software and paste the clipboard image in. Voila... there's your screen cap. Now just save it as a jpg or whatever image format you want, and you're done.

Here's the download link for TMPG: http://www.tmpgenc.net/

Thanks a lot everyone, I got it now.

The help is appreciated.

:thumbsup