[GailFan]

I started capping in December 1999. I had always been a big fan of vidcaps and always looked to d/l them first. Shadow Lord was one of my early influences, although he'd disappeared by 2000 and now his stuff looks pretty awful in comparison.

I bought a video capture box from a car boot sale. It plugs in to the parallel port, and has an RCA and S-Video input. Pretty low tech, I guess, but I've always been pleased with the results. The main problem is setting the video levels right - you have to fiddle with them every time you use it. Imagine every time you switch on your TV you have to adjust colour, brightness, contrast. Get them wrong, and the caps are rubbish. Get them right, and the results are good.

The first caps I did were of Gail Harris (Gail Thackray) in "Nudity Required" (when I first tried encoding videos last year, it was the same source material).

I was initially disappointed at what I achieved. I looked at some of the caps in my collection, and quickly figured out that if you scaled the picture, it hid alot of the noise and made it look better. Many of my early caps were scaled 50%, later I tended to 75%.

The next hurdle was capping from many of the NTSC tapes in my collection. At first, the images came out scaled vertically by 50%, but not horizontally. I scaled the x by 50% to even them out, but I was losing half the image straight away. Later I was able to capture NTSC full frame, but with some garbage at the bottom of the screen (which was easily cropped).

My first collage was of Gail from Electric Blue 24. It's still floating around the Net, even turns up on a few paysites.

When I do a collage, I usually try and capture the story. I went to film school (yup, I guess I'm a failed filmmaker too), so I try and grab frames with good composition, lighting, etc. One of my pet peeves is frames where the subject's eyes are closed. I'm also not too big a fan of just body parts, so most of my pictures feature the face as well.

My early collages were crudely assembled, and there was often ugly black lines around frames. Later I would crop each frame to the same size and lay them out in a grid. I'd cap say twenty of so frame, go through them to find the best, and from there try and make a 3 x 3 grid of 9 images.

Later, influenced by Dann, I started assembling frames into irregular collages. Quite difficult to do, although it allows you to take a full frame and get rid of the extraneous picture (when I was in film school, one of the tutors would pause our work, take a couple of books and plonk them over empty parts of the screen and demand to know why we'd shot useless space. I try and use that concept when creating these collages).

Later I started playing around with effects, but these often cause more problems than they solve. Unsharp Mask is great for scanned photos, but with vidcaps tends to highlight dropout and noise. However, when I started capping crisp frames from DVD, Unsharp Mask could be pretty good. Deinterlace can be good; when capping from video without a pause, you might catch a field (a frame of video consists of 2 fields, odd and even), resulting in a jittery pattern of lines. Deinterlace can extrapolate these, and smooth them out, although it wil also soften an image over all. I've also experimented with "adjusted the curves" in Photoshop, but the results can be mixed.

I got my first DVD player in 2001, and has now been relegated to solely being used for vidcaps. It's a piece of crap, (it will only play -Rs, and even then it can't rewind), but it has a good pause and even a zoom function. My first DVD caps were from Bikini Carwash Company. The contrast is a little iffy for the dark scene, but I'm pretty pleased with the results in the light ones.

The best thing about capping from DVD is that there's a perfect freeze fame. You can also frame advance and find the perfect frame, one where her eyes are open, and there's no motion blur... although the side effect of this is that I now produce alot of caps. From VHS, I'd make maybe 20. From DVD, 100. And, like DTravel, I archive them all in a lossless format (around 800k - 1MB for a frame).

Some of my later caps are from simply playing a DVD on my computer and making screen grabs directly from the player (if it's VHS I copy it to DVD-RW first). Easy, no plugging cables in, no fiddling with video settings, but somehow it's not as satisfying.

Why do I do it? When I first started on the Net in the 90s, caps were what I collected. Vidclips were pretty rare - they were primitive and there was nothing like rapidshare to store them. So it was always vidcaps I collected. And I wanted to try my hand at it too. I could never find anything on Gail, even the stuff I had myself on tape, so I made the vidcaps myself and shared them.