Years ago, on an old indie, I had done an older version of this tutorial. However, I deleted that indie and I wasn’t aware that some people actually used that tutorial -- I’ve had a few requests to redo this tutorial -- so here we are!
I’m going to be going from screencaps I took in VLC to icons -- however, this same process can be used for base icons, etc. I’m using Photoshop CS5 on a Mac, but from what I’ve seen the process is fairly similar through different PS versions. If you have any questions, PLEASE LET ME KNOW and I will be happy to help!
By the end of the tutorial, I will have a batch of icons similar to:
First things first -- obviously -- we want to open up photoshop:
We’re going to go FILE > SCRIPTS > LOAD FILES INTO STACK:
After that, this screen is going to come up. You’re going to want to click BROWSE:
From here, navigate to the folder with your screencaps/icons/etc. I highly recommend putting only the files you want to load in the folder, that way you can just select all of them. For just the purpose of this tutorial, I only selected a small handful. Keep in mind, the more you select, the longer its going to take to load them -- as well as the size of the file will impact it as well. 100-300 shouldn’t be too bad; but Photoshop might start having problems ( especially depending on the size of your RAM ) around 400+.
Once you have your files selected, click open, and this page will load the files you have selected; click “OK” and wait for it to open all the files in the stack. You will not be able to do anything in Photoshop until it is finished.
When it is finished, you will get something like below:
Some of the steps at this point can be arranged slightly -- and, of course, once you get the idea of what you’re doing, feel free to toy around with it and add your own steps - making it easier or more effective for you. I’m sure there are easier ways to do this -- this is just how I do it.
At this point, I open my file that will be where I work on the icons. I’m making 65x65 icons from this, but you can obviously make any sized icon set.
Now, at this point, I’m going to resize my screencap batch. If you’re making icons from base icons, you may not want to do this. And the size you resize it to is completely up to you. From screencaps where the person is the vocal point of the screencap, I usually resize to 300 as the width -- but, it’s all up to your own preference.
Now, in the batch file, select all of your layers and then drag them onto your icon working space. They might be off center, but merely drag and move them while they’re all still selected. Keep in mind, later in the tutorial, you can also go in and move each individual icon for variance.
Once you move them, you will get this:
At this point, if you want to close the screencap batch file, you can. I always leave it open until I’m done incase I end up messing something up.
Now, you’re going to want to go to the bottom of your Animation bar and click this: ( Convert to frame animation. ) If you’ve made gifs before, its the same button you would press to make the gif into frames.
Once you’ve changed it to frame animation, you’re going to want to click the drop down pictured below and select Make frames from layers:
It’s going to give you what is pictured below. Your blank background will always be the first frame, you can delete that. Any frames you have will be what will copy over to icons, not your layers.
It’s at this step you can start editing. DO NOT put your psd on top of the files until you get to this step -- when you click “make frames from layers” if you have your psd on top, it’s going to make a frame from each layer inside of that psd. It saves a lot of deleting if you do it after the fact:
You can add frames, text, watermarks, etc etc at this point as well. If you want to edit just one specific frame, select both the frame and matching layer ( to move the image slightly, adjust the brightness on just that icon, etc ) before doing so.
You’re ready to save? Great! Before saving, make sure all of your frames are at “no delay”/”0 secs” or it will mess up the frame rate of saving them all as images. If you had a background that you deleted after converting to frames, they should all already be at 0 secs, but just make sure you double check.
Now, go FILE > EXPORT > RENDER VIDEO:
It’s going to bring up this window. Here you can change the name of your file, select where its going to save to, name a new file, etc. You can save it as any king of image file you like, I just prefer .png. Just make sure you have IMAGE SEQUENCE selected ( and not QuickTime Export ) and ALL FRAMES.
If you’ve done it correctly, your selected folder should look like this:
And you’re done! Like I mentioned above, if you have any issues or trouble with this, please feel free to message me and I will see what I can do to help you!
I’m not sure if there’s a tutorial out there for this or not. I’ve seen tutorials just by searching google, but the only ones I found were older and outdated.
The process is actually SUPER SUPER easy.
This tutorial is for setting VLC to automatically take screencaps while you play a video. I’m doing this from a Mac, so the instructions for a PC may differ slightly.
If you have any questions, or if I don’t make anything clear enough, please feel free to message me. Feel free to reblog this if this helped you.. I know that, once I learned this, it made batch iconing 110% easier for me. Sorting through screencaps of a two and a half hour movie for my FC is a lot easier than manually screencapping a two and a half hour movie.
Screencaps and instructions below the cut.
STEP ONE is, obviously, open VLC. Go to PREFERENCES, as I show in the screencap below.
Once preferences is open, it’s going to give you the simple version. You’re going to want to expand it by clicking SHOW ALL, like I have below.
Once it’s been expanded, you first want to set your ratio ( you can change this at any time ) as well as what file format it saves as, and where it saves to. Make sure the file you plug in already exists.
Go FILTERS > SCENE FILTER. It’ll open the menu below. Set your path. As far as RATIO goes, the lower the number is the more often it takes the screencaps. The easiest advice on this is to simply toy with it to see what setting you like best -- the lower number, the more subtle facial changes you’re going to catch.
Now click on FILTERS again, and make sure that “scene video filter” has a check mark next to it. Then click SAVE.
CLOSE VLC -- you’re going to want to do this anytime you make any changes to this setting for it to take effect. Reopen it and start your video. Open the folder you told it to save the screencaps to and watch them start to pop up!
And there you have it! Super easy. Now you can just start a movie, mute it, and do something else if you would like. Or, you can actually pay attention to the movie without worrying about capping it.
