Screencaping: A Do It Yourself Guide.
Icons have become a roleplaying staple and it’s nice to be able to make you own, sometimes it’s more easily said than done. There are a lot of sites that post them for public use but it can be hard to find content for obscure (or older) movies and shows which leave you having to take your own. I’ve noticed that a lot of the roleplaying community goes about this the hard way – using either the print screen or snipping tool to take their screencaps one by one – this is tedious and unnecessary, I’m going to teach you an easier way to get quality screencaps like @hq-screencaps and @grande-caps post.
There are two programs that I’m aware of, KMPlayer and this video to .jpg converter @viridisalae turned me on to. I haven’t tried the latter yet so we’re going to focus on KMPlayer since I’m more familiar with it. Please keep in mind I am self-taught, there may be other ways to accomplish the same thing in this program, if so please message me and I’ll gladly add it in.
After you’ve installed the program and have it open you’re going to right-click anywhere in the ‘screen’ area and select Capture, another menu will open, in it select Frame Extract.
A new window will open, this is one we will keep open for the entirety of this project. It’s where you control your screencapture settings.screencapture settings.
This is where my being self-taught comes into play. I learned using a lot of trial and error and these are the settings that work best for what I need.
Chose a destination folder for your caps to be saved in (kmplayer does have a default folder but having one in mind in advance is helpful) and name what you want the title for each frame to be, this is from beauty and the beast 2017. the _ separates the number sequence from the title so it’s easier to read. You can call yours whatever you like as well as deciding how high you want those numbers to go. I use 4 digit numbers for movies and three for television shows.
Make sure in the number to extract section you have continuously selected, this keeps the program capping in the background so you don’t have to do anything. Size to extract is the size of the screencaps you’ll end up with, I’ve found original size works best for clarity.
In the frames to extract section, you can choose how many frames it takes each second or minute, that’s a matter of personal preference. For beauty and the best I did 2 frames per second which yielded around 14,000 (a lot) usable screencaps (about 300+ icons per character I did). Once you have it set up to your preferences click the video player again, the settings window should stay open beneath it.
Load your movie, show, whatever video content you’re going to be working with and select Open. It should begin to play within a few seconds.
Click the settings window you moved to the background and click Start, the screencaping will begin. It will give you stats while it runs, you can mute the sound and go lurk on Tumblr or have a snack if you don’t feel like watching the movie. The program will continue to screencap for you. No more taking caps one frame at a time.
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
titsay
