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How to take a snapshot
of your video within Movie Maker 2. |
| Movie Maker comes with a really nifty feature … the program lets you take “snapshots”
directly from your movie! This means you can go to any point within a video clip, capture a freeze
frame picture, and save this image to your computer’s hard drive.
There are many uses for these snapshots …
- You could e-mail “hi-light pictures” of your video to friends and family. Not everyone
can receive or view .wmv videos, so these pictures are a great alternative (and they don’t
take as long to download).
- You can use the snapshot feature to transform your camcorder into a low-resolution “digital
camera.” Simply point your camcorder at your subject and later you can go through your video
and take virtual snapshots directly off the captured video. I don’t have a digital camera
so I use this method to take pictures of items I sell on EBay … while the resulting pictures
aren’t good enough for printing, they are fine for WebPages.
- You can also use these video pictures to create title slides. I like to find an interesting
video scene that seems to “symbolize my movie” and capture a snapshot of it. Then, I’ll import
this picture back into my project and turn it into a “title picture” by adding an introductory
title animation on top of it. You could also add a title directly to the picture using a
photo-editing program.
The actual process of taking these snapshot is quite easy. While viewing a video clip in the
preview monitor, pause the clip at an appropriate spot, and click the “Take Picture” button under
the preview monitor. Movie Maker 2 will then ask you where you’d like to save the picture. By
default, Movie Maker will try to save your picture in your “My Pictures” directory.
If you plan on actually using this picture in your current project, I recommend saving the
picture into your project’s own directory. This will keep everything organized and keep all your
projects files together where you can find them. (you can find out more about this organization
structure in this article)
If you run into problems capturing pictures this way, this may occur because you don’t you’re
your hardware acceleration turned on. You can check this by going into your display settings,
clicking on the troubleshoot tab, and setting your acceleration all the way up.
Next: Making Video Slideshows
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You can find more
useful home-video "tips and tricks" like this one at Mighty Coach
- they even have an online-video course that teaches you to edit
video on your home computer!
www.mightycoach.com |
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