Just 'cuz I'm a dork... cool screen shot

[VegettoEX]

Came across this while taking some screen shots, and it was just too damn cool looking.



That is all ^^;;.

[Deus ex Machina]

Whoa, talk about irony. I just bought the perfect Cell DVD box set, for the purpose of taking screen shots like that. If only I had a graphics card...

[PsyLiam]

Er, you don't need a graphics card to take screen grabs off of a DVD.

BTW, VeggieEX, I'm assuming that you cleaned up that image slightly. What program do you use? I used to use PSP and flood fill parts of the image that are suppossed to be the same colour, but do you have a better way? And how long does it take you?

[Deus ex Machina]

Then how the heck DO you take screen shots?

[PsyLiam]

Basically, most software DVD players (such as PowerDVD, WinDVD, and others) have a "capture" button. This will take a bitmap image of the current frame and place it...somewhere...on your hard drive.

For some programs, there's an actual button on the little control panel display thing. Others (such as WinDVD, I think) don't have a button, and instead you have to press a key.

If you're not sure, open up the help for your player, and search for "capture".

If you're still stuck, tell me what player you are using, and I'll look around.

And, as a side note, every computer has a graphics card. Sort of. Some have them embedded on to the motherboard directly, and so are not technically "graphics CARDS", but they work in exactly the same way. The only real difference between most graphics cards is how good they are at doing 3d stuff, which is only really relevelent for games.

One exception to this (and possibly what's confusing you) is what's sometimes called a "capture card", although it's often just referred to as a "video card". This basically let's you send an alalogue or digital signal INTO your computer (the TV Out on most graphics cards only sends the signal, er, out). You can then use this signal to capture images. This is mainly used for taking pictures from TV or VHS. If you have a DVD drive in your computer, you don't need it, since the signal is already "inside" your computer, such as it were.

Er, I hope that makes sense. And I hope I haven't got that completely wrong.

[VegettoEX]

I do my screen caps the same way I do my music videos... I rip the DVDs.

Once I've got all the VOBs that I want ripped, I go through them with DVD2AVI and create project files (in and out points in the video stream, usually by episode).

With these project files I write AVS (AVISynth) scripts. The scripts allow me to do things like inverse-telecine the footage, pretty damn well eliminating the interlacing. This gives me a fully progressive 23.976 fps video stream.

From here, I just go through in VirtualDub (a non-linear video editing program, mostly used for pre- and post- processing on video clips) and find the frame I want, do "Copy Input Source to Clipboard" (or something similar, forgot exactly how it's phrased), go to Photoshop, create new, and paste!

That sounds like a lot of work, but it actually allows me to go through and pinpoint the exact frame I want, rather than relying on my timing to press the "Capture Screen" button, or whatever, in software DVD players or through the video card.

I prefer to do all my image editing directly in Photoshop, rather than letting any video filters do the work to the entire clip. That just slows down VirtualDub (and thus my CPU), and if it's just one frame (like it is with screen caps), I'll do it myself.

Once I've got the image pasted into Photoshop, I generally resize it from 720x480 (native DVD resolution) to 640x480 (the correct 4:3 aspect ratio), and then crop out the black borders. From here I'll usually adjust the contrast and color levels (generally letting Photoshop do the work by picking "Auto Contrast" and "Auto Levels," but taking over when I think I can do better ).

Once that's done, I'll usually do some type of "Smart Blur" on the image. Rather than manually fill in the colors, like you mentioned, Smart Blur pretty much does the same thing. It works WONDERS on skin tones, and usually does a good job with the rest of the image. It's a great way to clean up any macroblocking. You've gotta find a good balance between too little and too much blurring, though, because it ends up looking like water colors if you go overboard.

From there, resize to what I need it for (small for screenies like in the guides, or larger for whatever purposes), and do whatever else I need to do, like adding a border and drop shadow.

*gasps for breath*

Yeah, I'm an anal retard. But it looks nice!

The image in question, the Cell one... I did all of the above to. It actually didn't need all that much work, since it's a low-motion scene, which resulted in very little macroblocking. I did blur the whites in his eyes a little bit, though, manually... kinda blocky, in there.

[RatGoku]

This will be short: Very Good!

[Deus ex Machina]

Were you...speaking...word just now?

lol, I didn't understand a word of that. But I guess everyone's gotta start somewhere.

EDIT: I checked my DVD player on my Computer, but I couldn't find any help for a screen capture. I'm using MGI SoftDVD MAX v5.0 , does it support this feature?

[tablet the eunuch]

You know, he kinda looks like Megatron/Galvatron in that picture. Which is kinda odd.

Dunno, made me fell all kinda nostalgic and junk, kinda fuzzy.

[PsyLiam]

But Megatron doesn't look anything like Galvatron! I mean, apart from the big arm gun and all...

(Besides, there are now more Megatron's than there are people called "Dave". Stupid FUNIm...I mean, stupid Hasbro and Takara.)

As for MGI SoftDVD...I have no idea. I'll check and see if I can find out.

And as for MikeEX's scary long post...I'm scared.

Informative though. I always resized the images to 800 x 600, which I know blows them up slightly, but I think I was going for the "work on images as big as possible, and then shrink them at the end". I'll have to look at the Smart Blue function on PSP (which shouldn't be TOO far behind Photoshop's, hopefully).

One question though: How do you rip the DVDs? Do you use commercial software, or what?

[VegettoEX]

I'm actually not too sure what the truthful legality is for cracking the encryption of DVDs (which is called "CSS," or "Content Scrambling System"). During their legal battles against those who published the original DeCSS program, they inadvertently made the CSS code public in the legal written papers.. so... whoops on them!

Regardless, I use a program called "DVD Decrypter" that extracts the encrypted VOB files from the DVD to my hard drive. It essentially breaks the CSS and copies it over to the hard drive (you can't just drag the VOBs over, since they're encrypted).

Once they're on my hard-drive... uhh....

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... ogetb.html

That explains it better than I can

[TripleRach]

Picture...so awesome... Makes me want to watch the Cell saga completely through again, but I don't have access to every episode yet. ;_;

Third-Form Cell reminds me of Captain Planet, for some reason.

[laserkid]

NIIIIIIIIICE

But what I'd REALLY like is an image of that qualiuty with Gohans SSJ2 scene with the red line crossed behind him at the very start of the transformation, piuty theres no DVDs for that yet XD

[Gary]

That is a sweet looking screen cap Mike!

Get SSJ2 Gohan now! ^_^

[Deus ex Machina]

Get SSJ2 Gohan now! ^_^

Unlikely, since that episode hasn't yet been released on DVD.

[Gary]

Well it gets released this year so if he gets it then he can do it lol..

[Hujio]

I'm trying to make screen caps using VegettoEX's way, but how do you write your AVS (AVISynth) scripts? Other than that I think I've got it down but I'm stuck on how to write the AVS script and then how do I open it with VirtualDub?

[Hujio]

Well I figured out how to open the AVS script into VirtualDub, but what should I write in the AVS script? I think I'm confused...

[VegettoEX]

Here's a REAL basic example of one of my AVS scripts. What this does is load the MPEG-2 stream from the VOB (as per the D2V project), and inverse-telecine it (taking the 29.97 fps interlaced video, and returning it to its original 23.976 fps stream without the interlacing):

SetMemoryMax(5)
MPEG2Source("D:\VideoCapture\temp\ussj_vegeta_4.d2v")
Telecide()
Decimate(5)

The SetMemoryMax is really only if you're going to be working with it in Premiere; AVIsynth has a memory leak in Premiere that can cause the AVS scripts to get all mixed up.

The MPEG2Source command just points to the D2V project (which in turn points to a specific spot in the VOB's MPEG-2 video stream). Note that unless you're using the AMVAppfrom AMVorg, you're going to need a call to load up the:

LoadPlugin("D:\mpeg2dec.dll")

... command (where the path is where-ever it's installed to) immediately before MPEG2Source. I'll just quote the guide on Telecide and Decimate... Justin and Ian wrote it better than me

Decomb works in two steps. First you must Telecide the video stream - which essentially turns it into a progressive stream by reconstructing each of the frames that suffer from deinterlacing into their original frames. Then you Decimate the stream, or you remove the duplicate frames created by Telecide. This leaves you with a progressive stream without duplicate frames - thus you've Inverse Telecined the video.

Hope that helps a little bit ^^;;

Oh... and if there's any confusion on this (which there can be)... an AVS script is just some text you write up in Notepad and save with an *.avs extension instead of *.txt ^^.

[Hujio]

Thanks EX, that helps me out a lot. Now I'm not quite sooo confused...