Author Topic: Scrolling Capture Deluxe Thread (Read 67,337 times)

mouser · « **on:** January 09, 2012, 12:12 AM »

Early teaser:

barney · « **Reply #1 on:** January 09, 2012, 04:16 AM »

Yum, yum, eat 'em up

!

ETA?

Ath · « **Reply #2 on:** January 09, 2012, 07:44 AM »

I like this teaser

mouser · « **Reply #3 on:** January 09, 2012, 08:27 AM »

ETA unclear but before end of month for sure. I will update as I progress, and try to post some betas as soon as possible.

stom2005 · « **Reply #4 on:** January 09, 2012, 12:06 PM »

+ Yum, Yum

mouser · « **Reply #5 on:** January 09, 2012, 10:26 PM »

Another teaser screenshot:

mouser · « **Reply #6 on:** January 13, 2012, 04:57 AM »

Update: Work continues at a good pace.. Hope to have something testable soon.
It will be interesting to see how well this approach works -- one advantage to the approach is that this code, compared to the previous code, is much more amenable to modification and extension -- so it will be easier to improve.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #7 on:** January 13, 2012, 05:50 PM »

Sounds good!

Housekeeping:
[attach]

stom2005 · « **Reply #8 on:** January 13, 2012, 07:36 PM »

Can not sleep - waiting for DL every second - mouser torments me ....

mouser · « **Reply #9 on:** January 14, 2012, 05:27 AM »

I can say confidently that there is no going back now -- the new code is at least 80% done and will be ready for testing soon. It is no longer vaporware.

IainB · « **Reply #10 on:** January 14, 2012, 07:04 AM »

Nah, I'm all teased out now...

mouser · « **Reply #11 on:** January 14, 2012, 07:44 AM »

Just to give you a flavor of how the new system works, consider this notepad example of the final steps to performing a scrolling capture.

We start with a small notepad window as an example:

After telling the tool what object to capture, and how to automatically scroll it horizontally and vertically, you get something like this:

Note that in this first stage, the tool does not worry about capturing the scrollbars; for other applications (like explorer windows, etc.) you might also get the HEADER row captured in each scroll image.

Then in step 2, you can tweak the way the final image is assembled out of the multiple images -- this is similar to stitching together camera panoramas. Basically you trim out some extra margins, and configure the overlaps that happen during scrolling, etc:

Although this requires some manual help from the user -- I think it offers the best chance at getting the scrolling capture "perfect", and can handle odd scenarios that foul up the more automatic one step scrolling capture feature found in other tools.

What remains to be seen is how good a job i can do later at guessing some good default values given an image, to avoid making the user do too much hand tweaking with every scrolling capture.

Perhaps the major advantage to this new multi-step interactive process is that it should work reasonably well and be quite robust in handling unusual and tricky scrolling window captures that confuse other algorithms. It may require a little more work, but when you really need to perform a scrolling capture on a tricky window, it should survive where other tools/approaches choke.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #12 on:** January 14, 2012, 03:07 PM »

Keep going!

mouser · « **Reply #13 on:** January 14, 2012, 09:18 PM »

Another progress report.

The good:
1. Useable in scenarios where other scrolling capture techniques are not.
2. Very tweakable to get scrolling capture final output perfect.
3. Easy to abort and try different scrolling options -- including manual scrolling.

The bad:
1. Much too much work involved manually changing options to get the final result.
2. Requires skill and a non-trivial understanding of the process to tweak the assembly settings.
3. Tons of memory use.

The hope:
I hope that I can produce a fairly good procedure for automatically/smartly guessing good assembly settings by analyzing the resulting captures. That would mean that in most cases you won't have to tweak anything after the capture.

mouser · « **Reply #14 on:** January 14, 2012, 09:20 PM »

I would love to have some examples from people who have use cases where they would like to perform a scrolling capture but existing tools (other screenshot tools) have failed them --- so I can test the new method on these.

mouser · « **Reply #15 on:** January 15, 2012, 05:01 PM »

Wish me luck -- today is the day I try to implement the auto-guessing of values -- and the day we find out if the autoscroll capture is going to be powerful but incredibly hard to use tool -- or powerful and mostly automatic.

tomos · « **Reply #16 on:** January 15, 2012, 06:16 PM »

Quote from: mouser on January 15, 2012, 05:01 PM

Wish me luck -- today is the day I try to implement the auto-guessing of values -- and the day we find out if the autoscroll capture is going to be powerful but incredibly hard to use tool -- or powerful and mostly automatic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHKWBxDzyfU

cranioscopical · « **Reply #17 on:** January 15, 2012, 07:00 PM »

@tomos

I'd just taken a swig of drink when your post above made me laugh. Hence I sprayed a spittle layer for you.

stom2005 · « **Reply #18 on:** January 15, 2012, 08:24 PM »

....

IE and Firefox. I often have to do documantaions including websites.

Marcus

mouser · « **Reply #19 on:** January 15, 2012, 11:19 PM »

How do existing tools perform on a scrolling capture of the ctrl+alt+delete task list?

mouser · « **Reply #20 on:** January 15, 2012, 11:25 PM »

I'm happy to report that so far auto-guessing of margins and overlaps is working pretty well.

This is *extremely* good news -- it means that it should be able to handle the easy/common cases mostly automatically, while still letting advanced users handle really tricky cases manually.

mouser · « **Reply #21 on:** January 16, 2012, 12:30 AM »

Regarding:

Quote

I would love to have some examples from people who have use cases where they would like to perform a scrolling capture but existing tools (other screenshot tools) have failed them --- so I can test the new method on these.

This includes horizontal scrolling capture, which I know some other tools have trouble with.

.

ewemoa · « **Reply #22 on:** January 16, 2012, 01:12 AM »

Quote from: mouser on January 15, 2012, 11:25 PM

I'm happy to report that so far auto-guessing of margins and overlaps is working pretty well.

This is *extremely* good news -- it means that it should be able to handle the easy/common cases mostly automatically, while still letting advanced users handle really tricky cases manually.

Woohoo!

ewemoa · « **Reply #23 on:** January 16, 2012, 01:24 AM »

Quote from: mouser

1. Much too much work involved manually changing options to get the final result.
2. Requires skill and a non-trivial understanding of the process to tweak the assembly settings.

Possibility of profiles / templates being created / restored / shared among users?

If SSC shipped with some that corresponded to concrete use-cases, may be people could tweak for their own use -- simplifying the procedure for some cases and learning about the functionality at the same time.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #24 on:** January 16, 2012, 04:08 AM »

Quote from: mouser on January 15, 2012, 11:19 PM

How do existing tools perform on a scrolling capture of the ctrl+alt+delete task list?

Snagit handles that one with aplomb…