Printing Photos From The TV
How to keep images from TV shows or DVDs
This picture of the escape hatch of a Panther tank was taken from a TV documentary called 'Panther Rebuild' shown on the UKTV Documentary channel.
Introduction
This article describes how to take reference images from video documentaries and TV shows.
Background
Research and reference materials are very important to produce accurate and realistic scale models. Books and the Internet are great sources of good photographs. However, it is often possible to see the original vehicle of a model you are making on a television documentary or a DVD. Unfortunately, this is not very helpful in building the model. What is needed is someway to capture the images and study them.
Method
The first stage is to record the TV show on to a DVD. You may have a documentary already on DVD in which case that job is already done.
Play the DVD on a home computer or laptop. Almost every computer will have built in software to play DVDs and if they do not, then it can be downloaded from the Internet. Make the playback fairly large or full screen. When a scene is shown that you want to capture pause the DVD.
You now need to capture your screen image. How this is done will vary depending on your operating system, but with most Windows based systems you simply press the 'Print screen' key in the top right of the keyboard. This will take a copy of what is on your computer screen and put it in the computer's temporary memory (known as the clipboard).
You can now paste the image from the clipboard into a word processor, such as Microsoft Word and print it on your printer. Pressing the [CTRL] + [V] buttons together is the normal command to paste. Alternatively, you can paste it into an image processing application such as Microsoft Paint and edit it before print.
You will now have an image that you can take to your workplace.
~~ Last updated June 7, 2009 by Peter Hall. ~~