How to Screencap!

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A Guide on how i make screencaps. It's not a huge hobby for me, but i will do it for smaller fandoms and when I'm desperate.
I'm using a windows computer. You might need to modify a little for Mac etc, but the player should remain the same. My computer is at least 2-3 years old, i don't have a super harddrive and it's pretty meh at doing stuff - it'll shut down if i try to game etc, so i don't think you need a lot of requirements.
I use VLC Media Player - which you can get here. It's free and open source.


Screencapping
Making the best screencaps relies on quality source; try to get minimum 720p, and 1080p is much better. Older shows might not have these, so just get the best quality you can!

Automatically Screencapping
1. Create your folder - just wherever, as long as you know where it is. This is where you will store your caps.

2. Open your source file in VLC. If it's not your default, you might have to right click > open


3. Add your Settings. There are two places to set up to automatically screencap for you. The first is following these steps : Tools > Preferences > "click All" which will give you the following screen:



4. First Setting in the list on your advanced settings, go to Video > Filers > Scene Filters which will get you to this screen, where most of the magic happens. (click for larger on this)


You'll see a list of information that you can set up, which defines where and how much you cap.

Image Format This will influence the size of your files ; JPEG is slightly less quality compared to PNG and PNG isn't really needed. If you want a small amount of good caps, you could do PNG, but mostly - JPEG will be fine.
Image Width & Height Honestly i'm just doing what the tutorial told me here, and it works. so -1 for both.
File Name Prefix This is what your caps will be called, i usually use the show or movie, and reasonably short because there will be a lot.
Directory Path This is the folder you made before - browse for the folder, and copy/paste the directory path.
Always write to the same file if you click "yes" to this, it will overwrite the caps if you start a new episode. eg. tidelands1234 will become a new tidelands1234. I would unclick this.
Recording ratio This is how often it takes a cap; for episodes and movies, i would go 50-200, for small files eg a music video you can go down to 1-50, if you just want one scene and want ALL THE CAPS, you can choose 1-20, but you will get a lot of caps
CLICK SAVE to save your preferences.

5. Second Setting
I find it doesn't work if i don't set the folder up in the video area as well - they might save in a seperate place and be hard to find. So go to the main tool bar > Tools > Preferences again, but this time don't click "all" but just go to the video tab.

You can see that there are areas to add in your Directory, File name and Format there - make sure they made what you put in on the first setting.

6. Play your media Play your media, and as you do, it will save the caps into your folder. I do recommend closing it and re-opening it each time you change the settings, sometimes it doesn't refresh properly. The caps will automatically arrive in the destination like so



Manual Screencapping

If you want to screencap manually, you can, this is helpful when you want a really specific cap. you can do this in two ways

1. Pause > Video > Take Snapshot
2. Set up a hotkey. A hotkey is like a shortcut that will take the screenshot for you, it means you don't have to pause or anything. to do this, go to Tools > preferences > Hotkeyes. Change the hotkey for "take video snapshot". Return to your video and use your shortcut (i use shift+s) to take a screenshot. It will go to wherever you have set up in the auto-capping settings.

Questions?
Please ask questions so i can improve this guide!!!