Wide World of Women

Hey guys,

I think I have the video part down, and now I would like to make some caps to go along with my videos.

I am new to Mac, and was wondering if other Mac users out there could suggest a program for me.

I will be making caps from VOB files, which I have recorded onto DVDs.

Any help or tips would be great, I am looking forward to sharing with the community.

The easiest way to make caps from a video is with the VLC media player. Play the media, pause it when you want a cap, and press Command-Option-S to save a cap. Caps are defaulted to PNG, but you can change it in preferences to save as JPG or use a picture application to convert them to JPGs later. I use the shareware program GraphicConverter for the latter process.

Hope that helps!

Awesome, thanks very much. I just got the VLC player from this site, I had no idea it had a cap option, thats perfect.

I'm a little late here, but the easiest way I've found is to simply use the screen capture function built into OS X. If you press Shift+Apple Key+4 it comes up with a selector cursor that lets you create the exact sized window you'd like to be captured. It saves it as a .PNG as well, but you can go into Terminal and adjust this to save it as a .JPG.

I'm not the biggest fan of VLC's snapshot function, I don't know why I just seem to get higher quality with the OS X capture function.

Could someone please tell me how to get automatic screencaps with the VLC player on mac?

What do you mean by automatic caps? Are you talking about thumbnail previews for videos?

Otherwise there's nothing that will make caps automatically. That's why people who cap get the "Artist" title. There is actually some work involved.

You press Command-Option-S to take screengrabs in the VLC window. The video can either be playing or you can pause the file first. There doesn't seem to be an option to let VLC take screens automatically on it's own, but you're better off capturing the shots manually anyway so you know you're getting the best shots.

Thanks for the tips, much appreciated

Oh the shortcut key.

I dunno know if mac version you can set them in advanced settings, but I made mine the "c" key. It's a little quirky since you have to change the existing "c" key which is crop something like that. Then restart the player if I remember correctly.

I use VLC, but also use the mac version of MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5.

Yes, you can reassign keyboard shortcuts on the Mac version of VLC, too. I'm just lazy and keep it as the default.

MPEG Streamclip can be a little clunky and it takes some getting used to, but it gets the job done and it's free.

Another way is to use the Quicktime Player. Navigate to the frame you want, then press Command-C. Navigate to Preview application, then press Command-N. You should get a new picture which you can save to JPEG or another format.

This was actually the way I used to do video previews, but I would paste the images into a new GraphicConverter file instead. Then I found out that VLC makes screenshots in one keystroke.

However, I will concede that the advantage to using the Quicktime Player method is that you can go frame by frame for the exact shot you want. You can't do that in VLC.

The newest version should have a frame advance. It's the 'e' key by default.

I don't have the latest version because it requires Snow Leopard (10.6), and my laptop is still running Tiger (10.4). Yeah, I know I'm lazy.