FAQ
I receive a lot of questions about my sites and screencapping, and here I have tried to answer the most-commonly-asked ones. :)
About Making Screencaps
1) How do you make your screencaps? Is it just one person running this website?
Yes, it’s just me! I own a 27″ iMac, and here are the apps I use to make all the caps:
- Handbrake to rip the movie from the DVD or BluRay, at the best quality setting.
- Quicktime Player 7 to automatically make the screencaps (File > Export > Movie to Image Sequence) at a rate of 2 per second.
- Arcsoft Photo+ to quickly and easily scan through all the thumbnails and delete the bad ones.
- Apple’s Automator (included with the Mac OS) to rename and number all the caps sequentially.
- Transmit to upload the gallery to my web hosting
2) How many caps do you make per movie? Can you go back and cap this one particular still for me?
My capping program is set to automatically take 2 caps per second. No, I won’t change this – it means I end up with an average of 8,000 caps for a 90-minute movie. This is enough to capture nearly everything in a movie, it provides a good balance between storage space (and therefore cost), and number of images. And no sorry – once a movie is capped, I delete the digital file and donate the DVD, so I’m not able to go back and re-cap certain scenes for you.
3) How long does it take you to finish capping one movie?
Generally, it takes me about 3-4 days. Ripping the movie from disc takes anywhere between 1-5 hours (depending on if it’s a BluRay or not), making the caps takes 1-2 hours, sorting through the caps and deleted the credits etc takes about 30 minutes, and uploading the gallery takes about 6-9 hours. Yes, I realize I am on a very crappy internet connection (50kb upload max), but I live way out in the country so this is the fastest I can get! Lastly, listing the gallery on the site takes around another 30 minutes. Since I do all this in my spare time as I have a full-time job, it adds up to about 3-4 days.
4) Do you know of a Windows program I can use to make caps myself?
I never use Windows, so sorry, but no, I really have no idea!
5) What happens to the DVDs and BluRays after you finish capping them?
I donate virtually all of them to charity – I only tend to keep Disney Classics and the rest I give away.
About My Websites
1) How did you build your websites?
I built them using WordPress, a free and excellent CMS that can be extended to run virtually any type of website. I do a lot of web design for my job, so it was easy for me to set these sites up as I was already familiar with WordPress.
2) What WordPress Theme are you using?
At the moment, all sites in the network use the great Heap theme by Pixelgrade. I’ve only modified it a tiny bit to suit my needs – it’s very customizable yet lightweight and responsive, which is important as most gallery pages are very image heavy!
3) What WordPress Plugins do you use?
These are the plugins I have enabled on all sites in the network:
- Askimet – SPAM protection. I get hundreds of SPAM comments a week and Askimet makes sure they don’t show up for any visitors to see.
- Automatic Post Scheduler
- Categories Images
- Custom Field Template
- Drag & Drop Featured Image
- Jetpack – for Contact Form, Jetpack Comments, Photon, and Stats
- Multi-column Tag Map – I modified this myself to list Galleries instead of Tags though
- myRepono Backup Plugin – affordable and automatic backups of the site and database
- Quick Cache (Pro)
About Zip Files & Images
1) Can I use these images to make commercial-use items?
No. These images do not belong to you or me, they belong to the movie studios or production companies which hold the copyright over these movies. The images and zip files are provided for educational and non-commercial use only. Anything else you do with them, is at your own risk.
2) Do the zip files contain more or better-quality images than the online galleries?
No. The images are exactly the same, except gathered in 1 handy zip file so you don’t have to browse through 70+ pages to find the image you’re looking for. They do not contain more or better quality images.
About Me
1) Who are you?
My name is Micah. I’m a web designer and photographer, currently living in Europe with my husband, baby daughter and my dog. I travel a lot, and am a huge Disney fan.
2) Why did you start these sites?
Out of appreciation for the film makers! It all started with DisneyScreencaps, which I created to pay homage to the absolutely stunning animations and backgrounds in Disney movies. From that, it has grown to include non-Disney, and eventually non-animated movies as there is beauty to be found in all of them, and they are so useful to anyone studying animation, film making, story telling, costume design, special effects, and much more.
Do you have a question that wasn’t answered above? Email me. :)
14 Comments
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Well, I obviously don’t have knowledge of your particular situation, but as a software developer myself, allow me to share one of the golden rules of debugging: “when in doubt, check the logs”. Log files are your friends. They can show you exactly which IP addresses are being blocked, and possibly help you figure out a common pattern that they all follow (e.g., all of them might be from the same service provider, or the same geographic region, or the same subdomain, etc.). If you can find that pattern, you can add a rule to your server configuration to explicitly allow IP addresses that match the pattern, and voila — problem solved.
I appreciate that! Unfortunately I am not a software developer, just someone who builds WordPress sites as a hobby, nor am I an expert in how to read log files or server configurations, or any of that. Since the caps are shown through WordPress’ Photon system, and then CDN’d via Cloudflare, I don’t even think there’s any log files I can see. I’m just a movie & animation fan who started this little website as a hobby 10 years ago, and now it’s totally grown above and beyond what I can sometimes manage, especially since it’s still just a hobby that costs me money each month, and I have a full time job and family too. I’m really sorry, it’s depressing me majorly that I can’t figure out how to fix this. :(
Hi,
I’ve tried contacting you via the email form a couple of times, but you never responded, so I’m trying this route instead. There are a bunch of galleries on animationscreencaps.com where a large number of the images are broken — either the thumbnails won’t load, or the full-sized images won’t load, or both. I tried opening my browser’s developer console and then clicking on a broken image, and the console showed a “403 Forbidden” error.
Please look into this. This site is such a great resource, and it would be a shame if it became unusable because of all these broken images.
Hiya, Sorry about that! It’s a confusing issue – I can’t reproduce it here, and it seems to be due to some of my visitors’ IP addresses being blocked by my CDN. I can’t fix or change that, so it’s difficult! As a side note, any time there’s any problem I’ll get 50-80 emails within 24 hours from people saying the same thing. I’m sorry if I don’t have time to reply to you personally – I do read everything, thank you!
I see. So if the visitor’s IP address is the problem, then one possible workaround would be to browse the site through an anonymous proxy server, which masks your real IP address. Of course, some of those proxies may themselves be blocked by your CDN, which means this could ALSO be a way for you to reproduce the issue yourself.
Yep, tried that, and I still couldn’t reproduce it. Hence it still not being fixed yet – I’m a bit baffled and running out of ways to try and troubleshoot this. :/
Well, I obviously don’t have knowledge of your particular situation, but as a software developer myself, allow me to share one of the golden rules of debugging: “when in doubt, check the logs”. Log files are your friends. They can show you exactly which IP addresses are being blocked, and possibly help you figure out a common pattern that they all follow (e.g., all of them might be from the same service provider, or the same geographic region, or the same subdomain, etc.). If you can find that pattern, you can add a rule to your server configuration to explicitly allow IP addresses that match the pattern, and voila — problem solved.
Thanks for the tip – I checked this with my webhost and no IPs are blocked. :/
…Well crud. So much for that idea. I would still suggest consulting the log files, though. They can often reveal things you wouldn’t have thought of. I know the error is a “403 Forbidden” exception, so it’s definitely SOMETHING related to the site’s permissions. But I’m afraid that’s all I can do to help. Good luck!
Micah,
I’ve been emailing for weeks about the screencaps in the Animation and Movie websites. They seem to be glitchy because I can barely upload any screencap from those two websites. I’ve been emailing you to the get the problem resolved, but I have not heard from you so I don’t know if you are fixing the problem or not. If you can email me back or reply to my comment, that would be great. I want to be upload as many screencaps as I can without having any problems and I’m sure other users feel the same way as I do. Please respond to me as soon as you can.
Hiya, I’m aware of this but don’t know how to fix it. The images load fine for me and the majority of visitors, and only a small subset of visitors seem to encounter errors but no one can give me an error message or anything. Since I can’t reproduce it here, I’m totally stuck on how to fix it – I just can’t find a cause. :/ Sorry! I’ll keep looking into it!
Hi! I’m studying film making/cinematography, storytelling, etc. This is an amazing website! Thank you for all your efforts on this! :)
you should state the resolution of your images somewhere on the page. i just purchases the starwars collection hoping the images will be a high enough resolution for my project.
Hello! The images in the zip files are always the same size as the ones freely available – the only difference is the convience of downloading them in 1 zip. So for any gallery, you can always check the size the images will be by viewing the online gallery. :)