How To Capture A Frame From Any Video File?
- Open the video file using your favorite software.
- Press (Alt + Print Scrn) together on your key board, now you have copied the active window to the clipboard.
- Open Paint by going to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Paint.
- Click on Edit -> Paste (Ctrl + V) to paste your captured window, now you should see the picture, go� to File -> Save (Ctrl + S) to save the file.
Easy? yes. But what is that? you have the whole window
but not the video! Instead you have a black area where
the captured frame should be, why?
Because your video card doesn't use your computers
memory for playing frames! (Sounds strange?) Instead it
uses its own memory to speed things up for much better
performance and only uses the area where you see the
video as an empty window for the video to appear. When
you pressed the (Alt + Print Scrn) keys, you copied the
contents of the Ram of your computer assigned to the
window, that is why you saw a black area instead of the
video frame. Try moving the Paint window and you will
see parts of the video frame while moving if you still
have the video open (I told you it is just like an open
window) but of course it will not be saved with a file,
just black area instead of the video frame.
So what shall we do? I will tell you what to do without buying any additional software, just using Windows!
To do that, we have to stop our video card from using its memory and force it to use our computer's ram until we capture the video frames and set it back to normal again, here is how:
- Right click on any empty place on your desktop and choose Properties from the popup menu.
- The Display properties window will open, now choose the Settings tab (located at the top right).
- Click on Advanced button.
- A new window will open now choose Troubleshoot tab.
- Move the Hardware Acceleration slider to the left
(None).
- Click on the Apply button for your changes to take
effect without closing the window.
- Open the video file and capture the frame by doing the above four steps again.
- We now can see a video frame instead of this black area, now save the file.
- Repeat the top four steps to capture as many frames
as you like.
- Move the hardware slider to right (Full)� press Ok and Ok again in the Display Properties window to revert every thing back to normal and close all open windows.
Note that these steps should work with any video player and any video file type, I have just used Windows Media player as an example.
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