scap_it | WinDVD Platinum tutorial (with a side of Photoshop actions) (Reply)

anesthezea said there should be a capping tutorial for WinDVD. So here is one. Note that you do have to have WinDVD Platinum in order to cap. The basic one that ships with Dell computers (and possibly others) does not have capping ability. You can either buy the upgrade, or download it from Kazaa for free (but I didn't tell you that!).

Since there was a request below for Cruel Intentions caps, I thought I'd go ahead and use that for the tutorial.

Put the DVD in the drive and start up WinDVD Platinum. Right click anywhere in the video picture and a menu will pop up. Click Bookmark/Capture, and then Open Brower.

This opens up a second window. Click the little camera near the top. This puts it in capture mode.

Then go ahead and start the movie. Find the scene you want to cap, and use the pause and step forward/step backward buttons (circled) to find the exact frame you want. Try to find one with very little movement in it. Movement will cause a blurry cap. Note that the step forward button goes forward one frame at a time, but the step backward one goes back several frames at a time. Once you've got the frame you want, click the camera on the bottom of the browser window (also circled). The cap will appear in the top box of the browser. As you add more caps, they will appear in the box just below the last one. I've gotten up to 120 caps before, but then I had to start again.

Once you've got all the caps you want, click the button with a bunch of floppy disks on it (see circled...top right of the buttons below the caps). This saves all the caps you took. DO NOT CLOSE THE WINDOW WITH THE VIDEO ON IT BEFORE YOU HAVE SAVED THE CAPS. Closing that window closes the entire program, including the browser window, and you will lose all the caps you took. However, do stop or pause the video before you save the caps, as running the video takes a lot of memory, and it takes it forever to save the caps while the video is running, and the video will be choppy. At least it is on my computer.

The button in the top middle, with one disk, only saves the cap you have selected (just click on certain cap in the browser to select it). The button below the save all button is delete all (with the x and bunch of disks), and the one to its left is delete the selected cap. If you hover over each button, a little popup will tell you what it does.

I couldn't figure out if you could change where the caps are saved. Maybe someone else knows this. Anyway, it saves by default to a folder called WinDVD Capture in the My Pictures folder. It saves them as cap001.bmp, cap002.bmp, etc. First thing to do is move them from that folder to somewhere else. Because if you leave them there, and then cap another movie, the new caps will number the same way, starting with cap001.bmp, and replace the ones that are already in the folder.

Now. You would probably prefer to have them as .jpgs instead of .bmps. Here's a little tutorial on how to create an action that will convert all files to .jpg in Photoshop 7.0.

Originally, I was planning to create an action and upload it so you could all just use the one I made, but because you have to do a "save as" to convert the file format, and you have to choose a folder to save it to, and because you won't have the same folders as I do, especially since Windows XP makes every user put their documents in a folder named after their own computer and every one of my folders is nested in a folder that has my name on it, I'm just going to show you how to make an action. Which will be good knowledge to have anyway. And if you could follow that sentence, making an action will be easy.

(I'm doing this in Photoshop 7.0. I do not remember how actions work in any previous versions of Photoshop, but 6.0 is very similar to 7.0, and actions probably work the same way. Disclaimer over.)

First, open your actions palette by going to the menu and choosing Window>Action.

We're going to make a new set, so click the folder icon to create a new set. Name the set "Screencaps." It should show up at the bottom of the set of folders in the action palette. Click the name "screencaps" once, so it's selected.

Now open a cap. I'll go ahead and open one that I just made. Now we're ready to start recording the action. Basically, an action just does things that you can do manually, but it does them automatically. The first time you make an action, you have to go through all the steps, and it records everything that you do. Everything you click on, any filters you do, and adjustments you make, everything. Then, when you run the action again, it does the exact same thing you did. It really speeds up the process for things you do a lot, and that would be time consuming if you had to do it manually every single time.

Once the cap is open, click the "new action" icon. It looks like a page. Then, in the dialogue box, type a name for the action. I'm calling it .bmp to .jpg. Make sure it's in the "Screencaps" set. Then hit "record."

Starting now, everything you do is being recorded by the action, so don't do anything that you don't want to be done to every single cap you apply this action to.

Go to File>Save for Web. In the box that comes up, there are four tabs. If you just click "optimized," it will show you a preview of the cap at the settings you choose on the right. The 2-up and 4-up options show you 2 and 4 possibilities, respectively, of different settings, so you can balance file size with quality. I know I want to save this at the highest quality (I can always decrease the quality later, but I can't get it back if I lower it now), so I'm going to just use the optimized tab and set it to "jpg," check "optimized", and set the quality to "maximum" and "100". The other settings can stay as they are. Blur should be "0". Then click save.

Then it wants to know where you want to save it. You can save it anywhere you want. Leave the file name the same. The action will open each cap and save it as the same name it was when it opened it, except it will be .jpg instead of .bmp. I suggest creating a "holding folder," because that way you can run the action on any folder (I save movie caps in folders named for the movie), save the .jpg-ized caps to the holding folder, then move them back into the correct folder. Otherwise, say if you're doing caps in the Cruel Intentions folder, and you save them to the Cruel Intentions folder, but then you run the action on the Kill Bill folder, it will save all the Kill Bill caps to the Cruel Intentions folder. And because you're leaving them named cap001.jpg, etc., they will replace the Cruel Intention ones you've already saved. Not good.

Once you've saved the file, go ahead and close the cap file. The closing will be part of the action, too. I always choose "no" when it asks if I want to save the changes. That way, I still have the .bmp if for whatever reason I need it again (i.e., I make a mistake like saving to the wrong folder, and overwrite a bunch of other files, as I explained above). Also, I'm a packrat and I save everything. But that's a whole different issue.

After closing the file, we can stop recording. In the actions palette, click the stop button. It's to the left of the record button, which should be red, since it's recording.

The action is complete.

Now that you've created it, you can use it to quickly and easily convert all your .bmps to .jpgs. You can run the action on a single cap by opening the cap and then clicking the play button at the bottom of the action palette. But it's much faster to apply the action to a folder at a time. Click File>Automate>Batch from the main menu.

In the dialogue box, choose "Screencaps" as the set and ".bmp to .jpg" as the action. Make sure Source is set to "Folder" and click the "Choose..." button. The "Browse for Folder" box will come up. Choose the folder your caps are in, in this case "Cruel Intentions."

Don't worry about the other settings. Just click "OK."

Photoshop will proceed to open every cap in the folder, save it as an optimized .jpg, and then close it. Then all you have to do is go to the holding folder and move the caps back into the Cruel Intentions folder. I'm totally anal about organization on my computer, so I usually create a subfolder called "jpgs" or "web ready" or something like that to put the .jpgs in to keep them separate from the .bmps, which I've of course kept, because I'm a packrat. But that's just me.

There are probably easier and faster ways to convert to .jpg. Converter programs, and the like. But this way, I know I have complete control over the outcome and the quality. And once you've made the action the first time, it's only a question of a few clicks to apply to any folder.

There, I hope that was helpful for someone! Please, let me know if I need to clarify anything at all. I don't write tutorials very much, and I'm always afraid I'm either going to go way too much into detail on stuff that's obvious, or skip over things that aren't obvious.