peacefully
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cap_it
DVD Capping tutorial using PowerDVD 4 or higher and PSP7 or IrfanView
I figured I'd make a tutorial about the way I do caps since a lot of people have questions about it. There are a couple settings you need to set on PowerDVD to keep widescreen caps from being squished.
I know a similar tutorial has been posted before, but I do a couple things different and this covers converting and/or renaming large batches of caps at once.
Firstly, to use PowerDVD to make caps you must have version 4 or higher and you must have a DVD-Rom to run DVDs. It's like a CD-Rom, but for DVDs.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, no Dell or Sony version of PowerDVD takes caps. I could be wrong, but I think I've heard of people upgrading it and it working.
Okay, my tool bar for PowerDVD looks like this. I have version 4. There are other skins or versions that may look different, but they should have something similar.
You can use the camera button for capping, and I marked the config button to make it easier to find.
To set it up so your caps aren't squished (or to put it technically, have the aspect ratio wrong), you'll want to go to configuration - advanced.
You'll want to change the Captured Aspect Ratio to Current video window size. I also have the caps captured to file but I'll go over that in a moment.
Changing the setting to current video window size will make your caps much bigger, but it will get rid of the squished-ness. If you still want smaller caps, you go back to the main Configuration window, click the video tab, and select keep aspect ratio. Then when you resize the window you're playing the movie on, your caps will be whatever size the window is without making them distorted.
Now you're ready to cap. You can Capture to Clipboard and paste them into an imaging program to save/edit them, or if you want to cap a whole movie or show without stopping, you can capture to file and convert them as seen below. To cap, I usually just wait until the moment I want, hit the spacebar, then the C key on my keyboard. You can also hit the pause button on the tool bar and then the camera button. Space and C are just hot keys.
Okay, now back to the capture to file. As you can see in my advanced window example, I have all my caps captured to file. When I do this I can just cap as I go along without pasting them into an image program, but it saves them as BMPs, which are huge files. So I do all my caps this way, I make folders for each movie, and a subfolder for the JPG files I convert them into.
Using Paint Shop Pro 7:
Then I open PSP7 and use it's batch conversion feature to change all the BMPs to JPGs.
I make the output folder the JPG subfolder. Then after I convert all my caps (make sure you're done with them) I delete all the BMPs to save room and just move all the JPGs over to the cap folder. If you don't make sure you're done before deleting, PowerDVD will try to start the numbering of caps over and then when you convert them they'll try to replace the originals. If that makes sense hehe.
Converting them makes it easier to upload the caps to places like Photobucket because BMPs are so big that photobucket tries to resize them. Badly. JPGs are much smaller file size but usually just as good quality. It also saves a ton of hard drive space.
Using IrfanView:
I open IrfanView and go to file - batch conversion/rename. Again I make my the output folder my JPG subfolder. I open the folder containing my BMPs and select Add all next to the Input files list.
This program has a batch rename and conversion which I've found handy so that all my caps aren't named PDVD_001 etc. So I select Batch conversion - rename result files, use JPG - JPEG format for output format and put ButterflyEffect### as the name because I'm converting caps from The Butterfly Effect and that's what name I want them to be. The ### is so that it numbers them.
After you're done you can delete the BMPs and move all the renamed JPGs to your cap folder.
There's also a tutorial on batch cropping caps using IrFanView by prettywitchstar
I know a similar tutorial has been posted before, but I do a couple things different and this covers converting and/or renaming large batches of caps at once.
Firstly, to use PowerDVD to make caps you must have version 4 or higher and you must have a DVD-Rom to run DVDs. It's like a CD-Rom, but for DVDs.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, no Dell or Sony version of PowerDVD takes caps. I could be wrong, but I think I've heard of people upgrading it and it working.
Okay, my tool bar for PowerDVD looks like this. I have version 4. There are other skins or versions that may look different, but they should have something similar.
You can use the camera button for capping, and I marked the config button to make it easier to find.
To set it up so your caps aren't squished (or to put it technically, have the aspect ratio wrong), you'll want to go to configuration - advanced.
You'll want to change the Captured Aspect Ratio to Current video window size. I also have the caps captured to file but I'll go over that in a moment.
Changing the setting to current video window size will make your caps much bigger, but it will get rid of the squished-ness. If you still want smaller caps, you go back to the main Configuration window, click the video tab, and select keep aspect ratio. Then when you resize the window you're playing the movie on, your caps will be whatever size the window is without making them distorted.
Now you're ready to cap. You can Capture to Clipboard and paste them into an imaging program to save/edit them, or if you want to cap a whole movie or show without stopping, you can capture to file and convert them as seen below. To cap, I usually just wait until the moment I want, hit the spacebar, then the C key on my keyboard. You can also hit the pause button on the tool bar and then the camera button. Space and C are just hot keys.
Okay, now back to the capture to file. As you can see in my advanced window example, I have all my caps captured to file. When I do this I can just cap as I go along without pasting them into an image program, but it saves them as BMPs, which are huge files. So I do all my caps this way, I make folders for each movie, and a subfolder for the JPG files I convert them into.
Using Paint Shop Pro 7:
Then I open PSP7 and use it's batch conversion feature to change all the BMPs to JPGs.
I make the output folder the JPG subfolder. Then after I convert all my caps (make sure you're done with them) I delete all the BMPs to save room and just move all the JPGs over to the cap folder. If you don't make sure you're done before deleting, PowerDVD will try to start the numbering of caps over and then when you convert them they'll try to replace the originals. If that makes sense hehe.
Converting them makes it easier to upload the caps to places like Photobucket because BMPs are so big that photobucket tries to resize them. Badly. JPGs are much smaller file size but usually just as good quality. It also saves a ton of hard drive space.
Using IrfanView:
I open IrfanView and go to file - batch conversion/rename. Again I make my the output folder my JPG subfolder. I open the folder containing my BMPs and select Add all next to the Input files list.
This program has a batch rename and conversion which I've found handy so that all my caps aren't named PDVD_001 etc. So I select Batch conversion - rename result files, use JPG - JPEG format for output format and put ButterflyEffect### as the name because I'm converting caps from The Butterfly Effect and that's what name I want them to be. The ### is so that it numbers them.
After you're done you can delete the BMPs and move all the renamed JPGs to your cap folder.
There's also a tutorial on batch cropping caps using IrFanView by prettywitchstar