Making thumbs from video clips
 

I keep trying different search terms, but can't seem to find a thread that discusses how to make thumbnail images from video clips to make galleries from. Can anyone point me to a thread, or suggest how to do it? I've tried taking a screen capture while the video was playing, but I captured everything except the video. Thanks for the help.

I just play the movie using WMP, pause at the point that I want to use for a thumb, then use my image editor to do a screen capture. Crop, edit, save, next...

You may have to go into your display setting and turn off hardware acceleration if you get a black screen when trying to capture.

There's probably a fancy program that will do the job, but I don't do enough thumbs from movie clips to bother with it.

I bought a program called frame shots, it works ok and has a water marked free trial

There is also a freeware program out that called ImageGrab that plays the clip, lets you pause it where you want and save the thing as a jpg of the size you want it to..

Frameshots is good. But is you have XP then you have Windows Movie Maker. You 'Import Movie", then play to where you want to capture and pause, then you click Tools>Take Picture From Preview.

Thank you for this info - that´s a very helpful and simple tool.

I use a freeware tool called Media Player Classic. It looks alot like Windows Media Player.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player_Classic

Play any video file. When you find a scene you like just hit "Pause" and under FILE select "Save Image".

Usually I'll save 5-6 images from a video clip and pick the best one. Then I'll crop and sharpen it with Photoshop.

LOL
I have that and love it since it plays every kind of file but I didn't even know it saved images. Thanks for the info. ;)

Thanks for putting me on the right track guys. I think I remember uninstalling windows movie maker (along with solitaire and minesweeper) because it was pretty useless to me at the time. DOH!

eric, have a look to http://www.videocharge.com it's a very handy tool to work with videos. Give it a try and I guess you will love it

there's also http://www.virtualdub.com/

Thanks again for all the recommendations. There are some cool programs there I have not heard of. Media Player Classic seems to be doing the job just fine. Nice, easy, and quick for popping out a couple quick video captures.