Instant stills

Whenever we tell you about an upcoming release, there's always a small flurry of people who tell us they're putting their current projects on hold until the new version's out.  This time, it happened to me.

I was planning to shoot all the illustrations for the next volume of my series of filmmaking books this week. That usually involves taking about 150 images, of which maybe 60 or 70 get used. I generally do this by taking a full-screen screenshot of Moviestorm's camera view, then pasting it into Photoshop, and cropping out the area I need. It's a laborious task: even if each one only takes a few minutes, and even using macros, it all adds up. I generally allow 2-3 days to do it all.

Moviestorm 1.5 includes a new feature that's going to make a real difference to this process. In the camera view, there's now a screenshot button that exports a still. No more PRT-SCRN - flip to Photoshop - paste - save - flip back to Moviestorm every time I want an image. Just click, and the job's done. Even better, I won't have to suffer my PC running out of memory once I'm dealing with Photoshop files that have vast numbers of layers of high-def images. I reckon it's going to save me at least a day's work.