Hi everyone. After talking to Rush and GS in the chatroom, I decided to write a post for those of you who would like to know how I take the screenshots of scenes from the Charlie Chan movies for my Charlie Chan Game, I'll explain it all in two posts: this post on how to take a screenshot (capture the screen) and the second will be how I capture the scenes from the CC movies. In all, it's really quite simple to do and I'll briefly go over the methods. I hope this will help out anyone who would like to know this.

Capturing the screen, or "taking a screenshot", means you're just making a copy of what you see on your computer screen that can be saved as an image file. This is useful in many circumstances. In my case, I use it to make a copy of a scene from a CC movie for my game.

To begin, it will depend on what operating system you're using. I'm not a Mac user so I can't really provide specific instructions for those using Mac. However I did google the methods for taking a screenshot in Mac OS X. So if you're using that, see later in this post for that information. I'll cover mainly how to do it in Windows. The methods should work for those using Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7, however there may be slight variations depending on the operating system. I'm using Windows Vista.

Please keep in mind that when you capture the screen, your copying the image of the screen. It works similar to copying text. Whatever you had previously copied will be replaced with the image of your screen so you can paste it in an image editing program.

Capturing the Screen in Windows
Capturing the screen, or "printing the screen", in Windows is pretty simple to do. There's actually many ways to do it. I'll cover a few basic ways.

Method 1

The first method is to use the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard. This may be abbreviated in different ways such as "Prnt Scrn" or possibly "Print Scrn" depending on your keyboard. It's usually located somewhere to the right of your F12 key, again depending on the keyboard. I'm using a laptop so it's right above the Backspace key for me. Note that on some laptops, you might have to hold down the Fn key first before pressing the Print Screen key.

By pressing the Print Screen key, you'll get a screenshot of your entire screen. Try it now: press the key. You might not notice anything happening but if you go into an image editing program of your choice and choose Paste from the Edit menu, you'll see the image of your entire screen pasted! You can quickly try this by loading MS Paint. Choose the Start button, then All Programs, then find Paint under Accessories. Then click Edit and Paste.

You can then use the selection tool in the image editing program (or paint program) to copy the portion of the screen you want to save so you don't have to save the entire screen.


Method 2

Obviously you may not want to copy the entire screen but rather just maybe one window in your screen. To save time, you can use the Alt + Print Screen combination.

Hold down Alt on your keyboard and now press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. Now try pasting in an image editing program (or paint program like MS Paint). You'll note that only the selected window was copied!

All you have to do is first click on the window you'd like to take a screenshot of, then using Alt + Print Screen you can get a capture of just that window. This saves time because you don't have to get the capture of your entire screen and then have to select just the portion you want.


Method 3

While there are many other ways to capture your screen, some involving third-party programs. There's one program that comes with Windows Vista that is useful. I'm not sure if it comes with XP or Windows 7 though, so you'll have to check. Click your Start button, then All Programs, then Accessories and see if you see a program called "Snipping Tool". This program lets you capture your screen or a portion of your screen in various ways and has an interesting feature that can save time.

When you run the Snipping Tool, your screen will turn slightly grey and a little window will appear. Click on the down arrow button to the right of the New button on the Snipping Tool window. You'll see a list of ways you can get a screenshot:

1) Freeform Snip - You trace the area you want to "snip" or capture. This is actually more for tablet pcs so it might be a bit tough to do with a mouse or trackpad

2) Rectangular Snip - This feature is probably the best reason to use the Snipping Tool. You can select a rectangular area of your screen you'd like to capture. I recommend this option because it gives you control over the portion of the screen you'd like to capture. This saves time because you don't have to first capture the entire screen and then have to select the portion to use from an image editing program.

3) Window Snip - Select an entire window to capture (similar to just doing Alt + Print Screen for a selected window)

4) Full Screen Snip - Captures the entire screen (same as if you just pressed Print Screen)

When you finally capture the screen or portion of it with the Snipping Tool, it brings up a preview of what you captured and lets you save it. Choose the save button on the toolbar in the program to save it as an image file.


That's basically it when it comes to taking a screenshot in Windows! Again there are other methods/programs but these are the basic ways!

Once you've copied your picture, you can always use an image editing program to crop it, resize it, and save it however you like.


The below table is a summary of the above methods:

Method	Purpose
Print Screen key	Captures/copies the entire screen. Then can be pasted into an image program
Alt + Print Screen	Captures/copies the currently selected window only
The Snipping Tool	A free program that can be found under Accessories on your Start Menu in Vista and possibly other Windows versions. Has various features for capturing the screen or a portion of the screen

Capturing the Screen in Mac OS X
Taking a screen shot in Mac OS X is almost as simple as in Windows. There are various keyboard combinations that do the job. There are three methods: take a screenshot of the entire screen, of the currently selected window, or select a portion of the screen. These three methods can be used in two ways: One way copies the screenshot to the clipboard so you can paste the copied screenshot in whatever program you like, the other way prompts you to save the screenshot to an image file on your desktop.

The below table summarizes the keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to take screenshots in Mac OS X:

Keyboard Shortcuts that Copy to Clipboard
Keyboard Shortcut	Purpose
Command + Control + Shift + 3	Takes a screenshot of the entire screen (screens if multiple monitors), and saves it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere
Command + Control + Shift + 4, then select area of screen	Allows you to select an area of the screen to capture and saves it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere
Command + Control + Shift + 4, then Spacebar, then click a window	Takes a screenshot of the clicked window and saves it to the clipboard for pasting
Keyboard Shortcuts that Save Screenshot
Keyboard Shortcut	Purpose
Command + Shift + 3	Takes a screenshot of the full screen (or screens if multiple monitors), and save it as a file to the desktop
Command + Shift + 4	Brings up a selection box so you can specify an area to take a screenshot of, then save it as a file to desktop
Command + Shift + 4, then Spacebar, then click a window	Takes a screenshot of the clicked window only and saves it as a file to the desktop

I hope this helps.

In this post, I'll just quickly go over the methods I use to take a screenshot of a scene from a Charlie Chan movie for my game, for anyone who's curious or would like to help out and contribute with the game.

There are many ways you can do this, the way I do it is quick enough and simple.

While there are many different kinds of programs for playing a dvd on your computer, I use Windows Media Player (which comes with Windows) and a method of printing the screen as explained in my previous post. Obviously this requires having the DVD of the movie and a DVD drive on your computer for playing DVDs.

Basically, I play the movie in Windows Media Player and when I get to a scene I want to capture, I pause the movie.

I make Media Player's window small enough to be the size of the picture that I can post on the message boards. By doing this, I avoid having to resize the image later on (which you can do as well using a photo editing program if you like).

Then I just use Alt + Print Screen to get a screenshot of just the Windows Media Player window and then paste that in MS Paint. I can then quickly, using Paint's selection tool, select just the portion of the movie I want to save.

That's about it! However, there's one good feature in Windows Media Player that helps a lot when capturing a particular scene in a CC movie.

In Windows Media Player (at least for Vista), if you click on the View menu, then Enhancements, you should see a menu item called "Play Speed Settings". When you click on that, it'll bring up a panel at the bottom of Windows Media Player.

Near the bottom is two arrow buttons side-by-side, one pointing to the left and the other to the right. While the movie is paused, by clicking on the right arrow button, it lets you go frame-by-frame through the movie. This is perfect for finding the exact frame you'd like to capture!

Once you have captured the frame you want and saved it to an image file, you can upload it to a picture hosting site. I use Photobucket, it's free and easy enough to upload your pictures to. From there, copy the link to the picture that the site provides (typically I copy the HTML link to the picture) and you can just paste it into the message board post if you want.

Anyway, that's how I get the pictures from the CC movies. Again, hope this all helped someone who was curious or wanted to be able to do this. Feel free to ask any questions if you like.