"Is Copying Animation Offf a DVD Possible?" Topic

Hi there's a wonderful piece of fantasy animation in the film "Miss Potter" which I'd like to copy. It's a fairly recent rental film made last year. I'd like to do a painting of it so could use a photo as my gesture drawing skills aren't very good.

Oh it's the rabbit six-in-hand carriage hitch from "Miss Potter."

You just want a video screen grab?

What kind of computer do you have? Mac or PC?

Hard to grab screen shots with Mac, from a DVD. You need to copy the whole movie first. I understand it is simple with non-Mac.

HP with Windows XP.

when the scene comes on, try hitting the Print Scr/Sys Rq button.
On an HP keyboard, its just right of F12.
This will load a bitmap of your screen into the windows clipboard.
from there, you need a graphics program. Paint works fine for grabbing though. just open up Paint and from the edit tab select "paste from clipboard"
the image should appear.
from file hit "save as" and name the file.
it will be a .bmp file so you'll need a more sophisticated graphics program to convert it to a jpeg or gif.
good luck
R.

All sounds a bit illegal to me, replicating peoples intellectual property.
But then i am not a lawyer of any sort.
I would check it out though, i bet it says on the film that reproduction in any form is against the law, or something along those lines.

Don't get yourself in trouble.

Thanks for the advisce. I'll just use my good old "artistic license" to draw what I think it should look like instead. Actually it's a great reminder to work more on my drawing instead.

I do know creative rights can get messy instead.

Which reminds me one of the creator of "Howard the Duck" the film once said famously his dy in Hollywood would have been made for life if somebody ever sued him for stealing THAT intellectual property.

It's also a nice hint to use the lop-eared breeds which are my favorite too instead of up-eared ones.\

Thanks for the help though.

from file hit "save as" and name the file.
it will be a .bmp file so you'll need a more sophisticated graphics program to convert it to a jpeg or gif.

Apparently nowadays Paint will save to a number of formats, including JPEG.

My comps DVD player can slow down to frame by frame and you can do a manual screen grab of each frame. Its called Power DVD.

There are other programs out there for free that convert DVD files into MPEG,WAV,AVI and the like.

After Effects can convert footage into a photoshop or jpeg sequence (one frame one pic)

So yah there is heaps of stuff out there that will get you over the line.

Jim, you can download the VLC media player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/), it plays DVDs and all sorts of movie files. In it you can easily freeze frames and save as .png files which should be easily converted to jpegs.
I have used it to make order cards for WW2 games from warmovies and my girl used it to get a closeup of Damian Lewis as Cpt Winters for her desktop.

fraps.com will capure both dvd or game footage.

Los