ScreenShooter - Animated GIF maker - Help
ScreenShooter is an app. for capturing animated screenshots. This is the Help document for ScreenShooter.
Menus
File
The File Menu contains two items,
Save &
Exit.
Save
Saves the screenshot image sequence to a .ist format archive.
Exit
Exit's the ScreenShooter software.
Information
The Information menu has two items,
About &
Help.
About
Pops a dialog giving the application title, vendor and version.
Help
You're looking at it! Opens this page in the default browser.
Controls
The general controls for configuring ScreenShooter and animations include settings that are general or apply to all loaded frames, controls used on a 'per frame' basis, and output/message areas to provide guidance and image previews.
Main Interface
The general controls include three different groups of controls -
Screenhsot Region,
Sequence Params &
Image Capture.
Screenshot Region
Contains buttons to gain the 1st & 2nd screenshots for comparison, as well as a button to pop the Choose/Adjust Region dialog.
Get 1st Screenshot
Screenshooter figures the screen area to capture, by comparing two screenshots.
This button gains the screenshot of the entire screen before the screen region of interest has been shown on screen.
Get 2nd Screenshot
The Get 2nd Screenshot button gains a screenshot of the entire screen for comparison against the 1st image. Make sure you start or restore the application for which you want to capture screenshots.
Choose/Adjust Region
Pops the Choose/Adjust region dialog, to allow selection and honing of the screen area of interest.
Sequence Params
The Sequence Params section contains a single number spinner - Frame Delay.
Frame Delay
The Frame Delay spinner allows you to set the maximum desired rate to capture screenshots, in milliseconds. We say 'desired' rate since the application might not be able to capture screenshots at this rate. The larger the screen area being captured, the longer it takes.
Adjust the Frame Delay to see the target rate in FPS displayed in the Status Message.
Image Capture
ScreenShooter's Image Capture controls include Start, Stop & Preview.
Start
The Start button begins the screenshot image capture sequence.
Stop
The Stop button ends the screenshot image capture sequence.
The total number of screenshots, as well as the average delay in milliseconds between screenshots, will be given in the status message label.
Preview
Pops the Preview Sequence dialog.
Status Message
The status message at the bottom of the ScreenShooter interface provides feedback and help.
Choose/Adjust Region
The Choose/Adjust Region dialog allows you to select the region of the sceen from which to obtain screenshots.
Region List
The region list contains the regions on-screen that are known to be different, between the 1st & 2nd screenshots. It ignores small regions of difference, and automatically adds the entire screen size to the list. Click any region to see that region lighlit on the screenshot preview area.
If none of the detected regions is suitable, drag the mouse across the region of interest in the images. The newly defined region will be added to the list, and made currently selected.
To adjust the selected region, use the Zoom Views.
Image View
Shows both 1st and 2nd screenshots in a cycling animation that makes it easy to see the differences between the two.
Drag the mouse across the animation to define a new region.
Zoom Views
The 4 Zoom Views (at 2x zoom) of the corners of the selected region are shown on the bottom right of the Choose/Adjust Region dialog.
When selected/active, the Zoom View will show a yellow border. Use the keyboard up/down/right/left keys to adjust the region on a pixel by pixel basis.
Preview Sequence
The Preview Sequence dialog shows the current frames captured.
Frame Playback Delay
Sets the delay in milliseconds between showing each frame.
Frame List
Shows a list of all screenshots frames captured. Click any frame to view the screenshot.
Delete Frames(s)
Deletes the selected frames from the sequence.
Start Preview
Start the animation of the captured screenshots.
Stop Preview
Stop the animation of the captured screenshots.
.ist Format
The .ist (Image Sequence with Titles) format is intended to be simple and
transparent. Basically it consists of a ZIP archive that contains the header.xml as well as the
screenshots as PNG files.
The archive is not compressed. Zip compression does very little for image formats that are already compressed, and the only other inclusion is the header.xml.
.png Files
Each .png is named with the time in milliseconds since 1st January, 1971 that it was
captured. This amounts to a number that can be directly used to establish a java.util.Date
object (and probably dates in many other programming languages as well). Only unique images are stored.
If no image exists for the particular ScreenshotFrame, it will provide the commom name for
the screenshot as it's screenshotName.
header.xml File
The header.xml is XML that is slightly
more complex. It is a format determined by the Java based XMLEncoder semantics.
The header.xml consists of the
XML representations of
POJOs. Thes objects are represented by a single
ImageSequence instance that has an array of
ImageSequenceFrames
which each has (an array of) none or many
ImageSequenceCaptions.
Since ScreenShooter does not add titles in any form, the ImageSequenceCaptions will not appear
in the basic .ist file produced by ScreenShooter. Load the file in ISe-T
to add titles.
Related Tools
Access to some other tools might be very handy while making animated screen captures.
Image Sequence - Titler (ISe-T)
The Image Sequence Titler provides functionality to add titles and captions to groups of images captured in ScreenShooter.
Output Forms
Ultimately you will want to convert the .ist files to a more common type
of animation. We provide means to convert the sequences to
GIF &
MOV.
GIFanim
GIFanim will turn a sequence of images into an animated GIF. GIF's are especially good for web pages and documentation.
MovieMaker
MovieMaker will turn image sequences into JPEG based MOV files.
