FrameShots

FrameShots is a program designed to help you create image thumbnails from movies. It supports AVI, MPEG, QuickTime files, Windows Media files and DVD clips.

The interface of the tool is based on a standard window where you can video clips by using either the file browser or 'drag and drop' method. Working with multiple items at the same time is possible.

You can preview the video in a small, built-in media player and use a slider to locate a particular frame, check out the total duration, current position and video size, as well as adjust the amount of frames to skip.

Once the snapshot is selected, you can modify its size (same as the video or custom) and make some image adjustments (brightness, contrast, sharpen).

FrameShots can automatically trim the black borders and crop the image to the exact size. Besides saving the picture to one of the supported formats (JPG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIF, TIFF, PNG), it is also possible to change the default output folder.

Additional features of FrameShots let you apply watermarks (image or text) and configure some settings (e.g. transparency, shadow), change the video mode used to get screen captures and manage multiple profiles. From the 'Options' area you can choose the resample filter, set the tool to skip the snapshot step, adjust the JPEG quality and DPI, as well as make QuickTime file associations.

The video processing program requires a moderate amount of system resources, has a good response time and quickly finishes a task. FrameShots includes user documentation and supports keyboard shortcuts. We have not encountered any problems during our tests. On the downside, the interface needs some serious improvements in the visual department.