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Old August 4th, 2009, 06:55 PM   #1
DTravel
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Default Zen and the Art of Screencapping

I occasionally get asked why I make so many screencaps from a given movie or television episode. Since I'm in a philosophical mood (and a bit bored) I figured I'd write something up trying to explain my approach to screencapping.

The short answer is, "'Cause that's what I do, silly!". Long answer, I don't know if I can explain all the reasons for it but here are some of them. First, I'm something of an archivist (which sometimes is a nice way of saying "packrat"). I know most people are only interested in that one scene where the actress flashes her breast or the camera gets a look up her skirt to see what color panties she's wearing (and I'm not saying I don't look out for those shots myself) but I look at what I do as capping the movie or episode. So I want to get caps from all the scenes the actress appears in (or at least as many as I can get a decent cap from). When the movie or show is centered on that actress' character, that can be a lot of scenes. (Shows like Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls are good examples of this.) I also think that if you've seen the show in question having all those caps can remind you of the story it told or maybe a particular scene you liked, which can be nice. Or maybe it will encourage you to see the whole thing for yourself if you haven't. I also like to capture iconic shots. You've all seen on-set stills shot during production or promotional photoshoots. When I can I like to capture those kinds of caps.

Related to this is the fact that I don't use any programs to automate the frame captures. Some people do but in my experience the results are usually poor quality caps. Frequently one ends up with a lot of pictures where the actors are indistinct because of motion blur and I personally have other issues with the results. So I do it manually. I pause the video, move forward or back a few frames if I can to get the best image and then capture the frame. I save all those as bitmaps then do some tweaking to try to improve the image quality a bit more before tagging and captioning them as jpegs.

Second, while I certainly appreciate the "whole package" of a woman's body my favorite part and hence the part I focus on is the face, including all the different expressions and looks. So if there is a scene with a lot of dialogue where the camera is focusing on her face and her reactions to the conversation, I tend to cap more frames than most people. Some of you have foot or butt fetishes, some are leg men, others are breast men. I'm a face man, deal with it.

Third, I don't expect that everyone is going to want every cap. The thumbnails are there so you can preview the caps. Pick and choose the ones you want. The more choices there are, the more people can find what they want from what's available. For those few of you like me who want it all I usually include a RAR file containing all the caps for large posts. If I didn't, you can always ask. But no one is under any obligation to keep or even download all or any of them.

Finally, I do it because I enjoy it. Those of you who make caps, rip videos or scan magazines yourself know how much work it can be sometimes. Its a labor of love, if you don't like doing it you'll stop doing it. There's not a lot of reward in this, so you have to satisfy yourself first and foremost if you're going to keep on doing it.

A note regarding image and screencap sizes. http://xkcd.com/732/ TV and movie resolutions are small compared to computers. Standard definition TV is 640 by 480, "widescreen" is 852 by 480. High definition is 1920 by 1080 but some TV stations broadcast a smaller 1280 by 720 and still call that "High Def". (By comparison most digital cameras take photos that are in the neighborhood of 5000 by 3000 pixels.) Older material (such as movies from the 1960s) was filmed in 640 by 480 or 852 by 480 and "blowing it up" to HD isn't practical in many cases (or even possible in some). Same with screencaps, I could enlarge the caps but they would simply come out blocky and grainy and would be poor quality in my opinion. High resolution, sure, but not high quality. (Pet peeve of mine, the common usage of HQ for high resolution. Resolution and quality are two separate things.)

If you watch a SD DVD on your computer with the image full-screen, the computer is doing that same kind of enlarging. Which basically is just expanding the pixels. Higher end software will interpolate between pixels to make it look less grainy but its still just the software's "best guess" and won't look as good as something shot in HD. That's just the way it is.

I make my caps in the native resolution from the DVD. If you (or some other user) wants to enlarge the copies you download you can. There are any number of programs to do that with. But you lose some image quality in the process. I've tried posting such enlarged caps myself but they weren't especially popular and "re-shrinking" them back to the original resolution just loses more image quality. So I post the best quality I can in the native resolution and if someone wants to muck about with them afterward at least I've given them the best source material I can.

So, what about the rest of you? Why do you do it? What philosophical thoughts on this kind of work do you want to share? What about all of you out there downloading all this material? You have any thoughts on this? Just please keep it polite, if there's something you don't like be respectful in how you disagree. There can be a lot of ego and self-worth involved and there's no reason to be nasty here, while a kind word and respectful tone may sway someone to make a change you'd like.

The floor is open for discussion.
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I can reup screencaps, other material might have been lost.

Last edited by DTravel; December 7th, 2010 at 11:03 PM.. Reason: Updated my manifesto! :)
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Old August 4th, 2009, 10:04 PM   #2
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so who's Zen?
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Old August 4th, 2009, 11:15 PM   #3
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so who's Zen?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and...le_Maintenance
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I can reup screencaps, other material might have been lost.
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Old August 9th, 2009, 12:57 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DTravel View Post
aka "Why does that SOB have to post so damn many caps!?"

I occassionally get asked why I make so many screencaps from a given movie or television episode. [...]
The floor is open for discussion.

Speaking for myself, I suppose making my own screencaps, as opposed to using a program which makes them for you every 30 seconds or so, allows me to choose the parts of the movie I like the most (I'm talking of XXX-movies), giving my own "interpretation" of it.

It is a bit like making the movie myself, or "remaking" it in my own fashion. I suppose there lives a frustrated pornfilm director in me...

I like to work with porn-pics in general, remaking them with Photoshop or Ulead. Not an extremely meaningful activity, I agree. Still, it gave me a lot of experience in using those programs, which some day I will have use for, I expect.

Regards,


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Old September 26th, 2009, 06:22 AM   #5
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I started capping in December 1999. I had always been a big fan of vidcaps and always looked to d/l them first. Shadow Lord was one of my early influences, although he'd disappeared by 2000 and now his stuff looks pretty awful in comparison.

I bought a video capture box from a car boot sale. It plugs in to the parallel port, and has an RCA and S-Video input. Pretty low tech, I guess, but I've always been pleased with the results. The main problem is setting the video levels right - you have to fiddle with them every time you use it. Imagine every time you switch on your TV you have to adjust colour, brightness, contrast. Get them wrong, and the caps are rubbish. Get them right, and the results are good.

The first caps I did were of Gail Harris (Gail Thackray) in "Nudity Required" (when I first tried encoding videos last year, it was the same source material).

I was initially disappointed at what I achieved. I looked at some of the caps in my collection, and quickly figured out that if you scaled the picture, it hid alot of the noise and made it look better. Many of my early caps were scaled 50%, later I tended to 75%.

The next hurdle was capping from many of the NTSC tapes in my collection. At first, the images came out scaled vertically by 50%, but not horizontally. I scaled the x by 50% to even them out, but I was losing half the image straight away. Later I was able to capture NTSC full frame, but with some garbage at the bottom of the screen (which was easily cropped).

My first collage was of Gail from Electric Blue 24. It's still floating around the Net, even turns up on a few paysites.

When I do a collage, I usually try and capture the story. I went to film school (yup, I guess I'm a failed filmmaker too), so I try and grab frames with good composition, lighting, etc. One of my pet peeves is frames where the subject's eyes are closed. I'm also not too big a fan of just body parts, so most of my pictures feature the face as well.

My early collages were crudely assembled, and there was often ugly black lines around frames. Later I would crop each frame to the same size and lay them out in a grid. I'd cap say twenty of so frame, go through them to find the best, and from there try and make a 3 x 3 grid of 9 images.

Later, influenced by Dann, I started assembling frames into irregular collages. Quite difficult to do, although it allows you to take a full frame and get rid of the extraneous picture (when I was in film school, one of the tutors would pause our work, take a couple of books and plonk them over empty parts of the screen and demand to know why we'd shot useless space. I try and use that concept when creating these collages).

Later I started playing around with effects, but these often cause more problems than they solve. Unsharp Mask is great for scanned photos, but with vidcaps tends to highlight dropout and noise. However, when I started capping crisp frames from DVD, Unsharp Mask could be pretty good. Deinterlace can be good; when capping from video without a pause, you might catch a field (a frame of video consists of 2 fields, odd and even), resulting in a jittery pattern of lines. Deinterlace can extrapolate these, and smooth them out, although it wil also soften an image over all. I've also experimented with "adjusted the curves" in Photoshop, but the results can be mixed.

I got my first DVD player in 2001, and has now been relegated to solely being used for vidcaps. It's a piece of crap, (it will only play -Rs, and even then it can't rewind), but it has a good pause and even a zoom function. My first DVD caps were from Bikini Carwash Company. The contrast is a little iffy for the dark scene, but I'm pretty pleased with the results in the light ones.

The best thing about capping from DVD is that there's a perfect freeze fame. You can also frame advance and find the perfect frame, one where her eyes are open, and there's no motion blur... although the side effect of this is that I now produce alot of caps. From VHS, I'd make maybe 20. From DVD, 100. And, like DTravel, I archive them all in a lossless format (around 800k - 1MB for a frame).

Some of my later caps are from simply playing a DVD on my computer and making screen grabs directly from the player (if it's VHS I copy it to DVD-RW first). Easy, no plugging cables in, no fiddling with video settings, but somehow it's not as satisfying.

Why do I do it? When I first started on the Net in the 90s, caps were what I collected. Vidclips were pretty rare - they were primitive and there was nothing like rapidshare to store them. So it was always vidcaps I collected. And I wanted to try my hand at it too. I could never find anything on Gail, even the stuff I had myself on tape, so I made the vidcaps myself and shared them.
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Old January 3rd, 2011, 11:14 AM   #6
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Well where do I start, I have posted captures under various guises in the past and I am very much an archivist also .. I enjoy capping every scene which features an actress regardless of the level of sexualness on display.

I to of course enjoy the Cleavage, Upskirts and Naked captures I have made but I also enjoy going frame by frame (Sometimes literally) through movies and TV shows looking for some unearthed gems or parts that the main scene capture artists have missed.

As for my setup I actually dont use any I use what is already available online via HD streams (When given the option) and catchup services as well as going through my vast dvd collection, I can sometimes spend from morning till night capping shows and movies and have owned my own capture sites and forums over the years, however ..... I gave all that up as I found people were very unpleasent when it came to surfing my caps telling me to get to the good parts or I cap to much, I guess I just need a place to settle where my captures will be appreciated.

Thanks for reading.
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Old January 3rd, 2011, 06:13 PM   #7
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Vidcapping is like making a storyboard - you get a sense of the action without waiting for a download or, worse yet, watching the whole thing. It also allows you to zoom in on the "good parts", like underlining passages in a book.

If you're into making animated gifs, it's indispensable.
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Old May 3rd, 2012, 11:17 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DTravel View Post
This quote has had 'chunks' cut from it, to see the full entry go to the first post in this thread. Or click here:

...I know most people are only interested in that one scene where the actress flashes her breast or the camera gets a look up her skirt to see what color panties she's wearing (and I'm not saying I don't look out for those shots myself)...

Second, while I certainly appreciate the "whole package" of a woman's body my favorite part and hence the part I focus on is the face, including all the different expressions and looks. So if there is a scene with a lot of dialogue where the camera is focusing on her face and her reactions to the conversation, I tend to cap more frames than most people. Some of you have foot or butt fetishes, some are leg men, others are breast men. I'm a face man, deal with it.

Third, I don't expect that everyone is going to want every cap. The thumbnails are there so you can preview the caps. Pick and choose the ones you want. The more choices there are, the more people can find what they want from what's available. For those few of you like me who want it all I usually include a RAR file containing all the caps for large posts. If I didn't, you can always ask. But no one is under any obligation to keep or even download all or any of them...

So, what about the rest of you? Why do you do it? What philosophical thoughts on this kind of work do you want to share? What about all of you out there downloading all this material? You have any thoughts on this? Just please keep it polite, if there's something you don't like be respectful in how you disagree. There can be a lot of ego and self-worth involved and there's no reason to be nasty here, while a kind word and respectful tone may sway someone to make a change you'd like.

The floor is open for discussion.
I'm with you DTravel, I'm a face man too. I'm not averse to the other bits but for me the expression on a Celeb's (or model's) face is all important to it's arousal factor. Check this image to see what I mean: http://www.imagebam.com/image/a14c0d187750971 the expression on Marie Harper's face is a complete turn off for me. I've never seen a model look so bored.

At first, I used to cap images of people in the whole (meaning to include the whole body, not any other kind of hole - I never got that lucky!) if they happened to be in a nice outfit, or better still, a state of undress. It was(is), however a useful reference to their body shape and size, but I'll come onto that later (no giggling at the back).

Then I started capping with the intention of using the faces to make fakes. Some of the fakes I made still work for me, but again it's mostly due to picking the right expression for the activity the attached body is engaged in, and the body in question resembling that of attached face's true owner. I hate fakes where the body used bears no resemblance to the person in question, usually it's using a body with bigger boobs. To me, if you're going to get off on a fake, it has to be believable, or is that just me?

Anyway, over time I found that just looking at a cap with the 'right' expression gave my imagination the boost it needed to be able to visualise the rest of the image with her doing just what I wanted.

I've only ever 'capped' from live (analogue) TV, but I'd be happy to share. I suppose I should go away and make a list of what/who I've got, but since that may take some time, let me know if you have any requests. Please bear in mind that my caps are limited to those programmes that have been broadcast on UK television, (so there won't be any porn stars) it's mainly minor celebs.
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Old July 2nd, 2013, 07:51 PM   #9
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Default "The Firm" - Screen Caps of Jeanne Triplehorn/ The Face

I read your article with great interest. I am not new to screen caps but I am new to involvement in any forum or group. I am also not knowledgeable (yet) on the best methods for screen caps. I would like to know the best method for that, which I assume would be to start with a HD Blue Ray disk in your computer and then use a capture program.

In the meantime, I was wondering if you have or if you can get the screen caps from The Firm of the many scenes where Jeanne Tripplehorn is wearing her hair up (which is much of the movie). The woman is stunningly beautiful with her hair this way.

Thanks for your help.
Rick
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Old July 3rd, 2013, 05:18 AM   #10
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Originally Posted by hegel333 View Post
In the meantime, I was wondering if you have or if you can get the screen caps from The Firm of the many scenes where Jeanne Tripplehorn is wearing her hair up (which is much of the movie). The woman is stunningly beautiful with her hair this way.

Thanks for your help.
Rick
Well, assuming I could find get a DVD/BR of it I could put it in my queue. At my current rate I should get to it in, oh 10 to 15 years?
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I rage and weep for my country.
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I can reup screencaps, other material might have been lost.
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