Saturday 19 May 2012

Screen grab without any additional hardware (or software)

When I send the DVD copies back to customers I print stills from the films onto the DVD and case inserts. In the past I have been asked how to get further images by customers and have ended up asking what PC software they have and advising techniques based on their software.
There is, however, a fairly easy way which I have detailed below.


1. Play the video file or DVD on your pc using whatever video software you already have (usually something like Windows Media Player). Pause the video at the position where you want to grab the still


2. Keep the media player screen quite large and move the mouse so that the cursor is not over the image to be grabbed. Look at your PC keyboard; usually along the top row, next to the f12 key is a key marked 'print screen' or 'prtsc' - press this once.


3. Open 'Paint' - this is a program included within Windows (Start/All Programs/Accessories/Paint) and press edit/paste


you'll get the screen shot pasted


4. Now click the square dashed 'select' icon ( just below 'Edit') and draw a dotted box around the image you are grabbing, you get a dotted box around the image (close up shown below)


 5. Now click Edit/cut, then File/New. Choose 'Don't Save'


6. Then when presented with a new 'untitled' page, click edit/paste and the image you had selected and 'cut' in 4. will be pasted here


7. Now it is simply a case of saving the image - File/Save as - the default is bitmaps but a drop-down menu will let you change to a jpeg if you prefer.


So there you have it, I hope it doesn't look too complicated because it is fairly easy and after a few goes it will be like second nature



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