Gotta Catch 'em All
We love when bus riders catch Muni meltdowns in any format -- on tape, photos, or screengrabs. Seriously, it makes us giddy. But one reader pointed out yesterday that screengrabbing isn't an immediately intuitive skill, so here's some instructions for getting a good shot of the NextMuni map.
On a Mac, you can save the screen to the desktop by hitting Shift-Apple-3. (Also known as Shift-Command-3, or Shift-Swedish-Campground-3 ... why does Apple have three different names for the same button?) Or you can save just a selected area by hitting Shift-Apple-4.
On a PC, we can never remember how to take a screengrab. We know that some combination of buttons involving the "Print Screen" button causes the current display to be fed into the clipboard, which you can then paste into MSPaint and then save. But we'll be damned if we can remember what that combination is. Just mash 'em all until the computer does something similar to what you wanted (which is the general workflow for any task on a PC). We've had luck with an app called Screenshot Captor which is incredibly difficult to use but yields useful results once you've figured it out.
After the jump: Advanced screengrab techniques! We teach you how to make an animated NextMuni movie like the one above.
To make a stop-motion animation out of NextMuni screengrabs, you'll need at least one Mac. Sorry, but we just haven't figured out a way to create animations with just a PC. We use a PC to take the screengrabs, since we don't want our Mac to be occupied with drudge-work all day long; then we copy them over to the Mac, import them into iPhoto, and then import them from there into iMovie.
The first step is to take timed screenshots, ideally every 20 seconds.
On a Mac, you can do that by writing a little app to do just that -- please note that this geeky process involves some trial and error and debugging. (Also, it seems to only work on user accounts with admin access). You can click on the time up in the upper-right hand corner of the screen to access a very attractive floating clock that can sit on top of your map.
On a PC, you can use Screenshot Captor to take timed screenshots. It is not an easy program to learn. If you know of anything better, please do let us know. You can get an ugly clock to sit on top of your map from Microsoft's Windows 95 Powertoys.
Once you've got a day's worth of JPEGs, drop them into their own album in iPhoto. Then open up iMovie and click over to the Media button. Select all of the images (there'll be hundreds, if not thousands); turn off the Ken Burns Effect, and set the duration as low as possible -- three frames. Then drag them into the timeline, and go make yourself a cup of tea because this'll take a while. When it's done, you'll have an animation of buses crawling around like ants. Save immediately, because it's a big project and might crash your poor puny little iMac.
We recommend Guba for uploading, because the level of discourse in YouTube comments hovers somewhere below MySpace. And also because we're friends with Guba's community-outreach guy. Guba's still working out some of their tech kinks, though, so if you've got a low tolerance for debugging (unlikely if you've followed us this far) you might want to stick with faithful old workhorse YouTube.
And please, let us know whenever you've caught something of interest!