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hector_rashbaumI've yet to figure out exactly wtf it is about Torchwood that, when I've never had any desire to get fannish about any other tv show, makes me want to do all those fan-y things like ficcing and analyzing and making prettypretty icons and wallpapers and shit. But hey, if you're running Leopard and ever feel the need to get comprehensive screen caps taken and cropped down with minimal effort, my weird fannish obsessiveness is your gain! Heck yes.
I spent a good chunk of last night setting up a way to make screen capping easier, because it's way way way not fun to just sit through an episode with my fingers locked on shift-command-3 and then have a couple hundred pictures to edit. I'm not yet obsessive enough to consider that worthwhile.
So step one is to automate the actual capping. I've started working on learning AppleScript, but I'm not particularly far along. I managed to find the bits and pieces I thought I needed, and cobbled them together (and prayed, on first run, my computer wouldn't explode). The text and saving instructions are behind the cut, or you can just download mine.
Open Script Editor and either copy this in, or type it yourself (¬ is option-enter):
Save it as an application, and check the "Stay Open" option.
This script will take a shot every 5 seconds; if you want to change that, just edit "property shot_interval".
Easy enough! Just open the app, it'll ask you where to save, and start capping until you close it.
So now you've got a folder full of caps. I open timed_caps before I start up VLC, and close it after, so I always have a couple shots that aren't of the show at the beginning and end.
If you're like me, you're ridiculously anal about naming in order, and since deleting your first couple shots means your first cap isn't labeled "screen1", you'll want to rename. But if you're like me you're also too lazy to go through and number every single one (an episode of Torchwood yields 400-500 shots. Yeah no thanks).
Download Name Mangler. It rocks.
When you open NameMangler, select all your caps and drag them into the left-hand column. Choose "Number Sequentially" from the drop-down at the top, leave everything else as-is, and click the check mark next to the drop-down. It only takes a minute or so to go through 500 files, and you'll have a lovely set from 001 to 500. Mmmmm organization.
Now they're all saved and numbered - but unless your screen exactly matches the aspect ratio of the video, even if you were in full screen there's probably some crap you want cropped out. OH BOY TIME TO CROP 500 PHOTOS BY HAND. Except not! Photoshop makes life easy yay.
Open the first cap. Go to Window > Actions. The top right corner of the Actions dialogue has an arrow with three lines; click that and choose New Action (Actually, since I'll have a couple different actions when I'm done both seasons, I created a New Set first. If you want a separate folder for your cap-cropping actions, make a set; if not, don't). Name it something appropriate (or don't, who cares), click OK, and the Actions dialogue will show a red circle at the bottom - it's recording what you do.
Crop, or cut down the canvas size, or do whatever it is you do to get rid of the junk. Click the gray square next to the red circle in the Actions dialogue, and yay! You've automated the cropping.
You can do more than one thing - Actions will take everything you do between starting the recording and clicking stop as part of that one action. I prefer to do anything more in-depth than cropping by hand, but you can set it to crop and then Auto Level/Auto Color/Auto Contrast, or crop and then rotate, or crop and then resize...etc. Just keep in mind that when you do the next step, Photoshop will apply what you've just done to every single photo.
To batch process, go to File>Automate>Batch. Your newly created Action should be selected in the second drop-down; if not, select it. Under "Source", choose the folder where your caps are located, under "Destination" choose "Save and Close". When you click OK, Photoshop will go through every picture in the folder, cropping it exactly the same way you cropped the first. This can get really resource-heavy - if you've got 500 photos like I did, you'll want to set it going sometime you don't really need the computer for half an hour or so.
When that's all done - you're done! Barring any editing you want to do by hand, of course. You have a folder full of correctly-numbered screencaps covering every five seconds of your video, with any extraneous junk cropped out, in a fraction of the time and requiring a fraction of the energy doing it manually would be. Yaaaaay technology.
I spent a good chunk of last night setting up a way to make screen capping easier, because it's way way way not fun to just sit through an episode with my fingers locked on shift-command-3 and then have a couple hundred pictures to edit. I'm not yet obsessive enough to consider that worthwhile.
So step one is to automate the actual capping. I've started working on learning AppleScript, but I'm not particularly far along. I managed to find the bits and pieces I thought I needed, and cobbled them together (and prayed, on first run, my computer wouldn't explode). The text and saving instructions are behind the cut, or you can just download mine.
Open Script Editor and either copy this in, or type it yourself (¬ is option-enter):
property save_location : ""
property shot_count : 1
property shot_interval : 5 -- in seconds
on run {}
set save_location to ¬
(choose folder with prompt "Choose where to save screenshots")
set shot_count to 1
end run
on idle
do shell script "screencapture " & ¬
quoted form of POSIX path of save_location ¬
& "screen" & (shot_count as string) & ".png"
set shot_count to shot_count + 1
return shot_interval
end idleSave it as an application, and check the "Stay Open" option.
This script will take a shot every 5 seconds; if you want to change that, just edit "property shot_interval".
Easy enough! Just open the app, it'll ask you where to save, and start capping until you close it.
So now you've got a folder full of caps. I open timed_caps before I start up VLC, and close it after, so I always have a couple shots that aren't of the show at the beginning and end.
If you're like me, you're ridiculously anal about naming in order, and since deleting your first couple shots means your first cap isn't labeled "screen1", you'll want to rename. But if you're like me you're also too lazy to go through and number every single one (an episode of Torchwood yields 400-500 shots. Yeah no thanks).
Download Name Mangler. It rocks.
When you open NameMangler, select all your caps and drag them into the left-hand column. Choose "Number Sequentially" from the drop-down at the top, leave everything else as-is, and click the check mark next to the drop-down. It only takes a minute or so to go through 500 files, and you'll have a lovely set from 001 to 500. Mmmmm organization.
Now they're all saved and numbered - but unless your screen exactly matches the aspect ratio of the video, even if you were in full screen there's probably some crap you want cropped out. OH BOY TIME TO CROP 500 PHOTOS BY HAND. Except not! Photoshop makes life easy yay.
Open the first cap. Go to Window > Actions. The top right corner of the Actions dialogue has an arrow with three lines; click that and choose New Action (Actually, since I'll have a couple different actions when I'm done both seasons, I created a New Set first. If you want a separate folder for your cap-cropping actions, make a set; if not, don't). Name it something appropriate (or don't, who cares), click OK, and the Actions dialogue will show a red circle at the bottom - it's recording what you do.
Crop, or cut down the canvas size, or do whatever it is you do to get rid of the junk. Click the gray square next to the red circle in the Actions dialogue, and yay! You've automated the cropping.
You can do more than one thing - Actions will take everything you do between starting the recording and clicking stop as part of that one action. I prefer to do anything more in-depth than cropping by hand, but you can set it to crop and then Auto Level/Auto Color/Auto Contrast, or crop and then rotate, or crop and then resize...etc. Just keep in mind that when you do the next step, Photoshop will apply what you've just done to every single photo.
To batch process, go to File>Automate>Batch. Your newly created Action should be selected in the second drop-down; if not, select it. Under "Source", choose the folder where your caps are located, under "Destination" choose "Save and Close". When you click OK, Photoshop will go through every picture in the folder, cropping it exactly the same way you cropped the first. This can get really resource-heavy - if you've got 500 photos like I did, you'll want to set it going sometime you don't really need the computer for half an hour or so.
When that's all done - you're done! Barring any editing you want to do by hand, of course. You have a folder full of correctly-numbered screencaps covering every five seconds of your video, with any extraneous junk cropped out, in a fraction of the time and requiring a fraction of the energy doing it manually would be. Yaaaaay technology.
