Scenegrabber.NET

Multimedia file management and editing is a common practice nowadays, since most activities meet or are related to pictures and videos, as well as the abundance of dedicated editing applications. In order to prepare specific material for editing, Scenegrabber.NET gives you the possibility to extract any given frame from movies.

Judging by the name, there are two first things you quickly notice. One of them is the actual purpose of the application, but it shouldn’t be confused with options to record screen activity. On the other hand, the final part leads us to believe it might require .NET Framework to work, and it does, so go ahead and install it if you haven’t already.

With everything set up, the application makes an average first impression through the classic window and interface design. However, elements are clearly visible and well-organized, with the main space split into a preview area for the movie itself, as well as grabbed frames, and additional controls in the upper toolbar.

The application lets you import a decent amount of different video file formats such as AVI, MPG, ASF, WMV, MOV, and MP4. You can import them either through the built-in open dialog, or dragging one or more files over the main window, because batch processing is supported.

Playback is triggered from the upper toolbar buttons, with options to play at normal speed, and skip through frames at three different levels. Moreover, you can drag the progress slider around for easier navigation.

At the press of a button, the current frame is grabbed and shown in the bottom list. Time and frame are shown in a small area so you know what and where you grabbed from. There’s another option that automatically splits the video in frames at a regular time interval, with the value being editable, and images delivered only if the function is called.

Paying a visit to the options menu lets you take a look at a few things like layout, time code text, background, batch mode, output, watermark, as well as file details. You mostly get to edit font and color options, but there are also quality options for exporting grabbed frames.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Screengrabber.NET can do for rudimentary tasks where you quickly need to grab specific frames from a movie, but it still has a lot of room for improvement. The preview doesn’t always work, stability isn’t at its best, and editing feels difficult every now and then.