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Introduction
There may be occasions when playing a video in QuickTime under MacOS X that you need to take a screenshot of the video you’re watching.
Fortunately, this is very easy under MacOS X.
First, open the video in QuickTime, and navigate to the part of the film you want to screen-grab. Then pause the video by pressing Space, or by clicking the pause button. You can move forwards and backwards in the video, frame-by-frame, by using the left and right arrow keys.
Now do the following:-
- Hold down Cmd + Shift and press 4 – the mouse pointer will change to a crosshair
- Press Space, and the mouse pointer will change again, this time to a camera, and the QuickTime window will be highlighted in blue.
- Left-click anywhere within the video to save a screenshot to your desktop. The filename will be “Screen Shot” followed by the current date and time.
If you open the image in preview you’ll notice that it has a border and a drop shadow.
If you want to take a screen shot without the drop shadow, you can either switch to full screen before following steps 1 to 3 above, or you can open a terminal window and type the following two lines, pressing Return after each line.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool TRUE
killall SystemUIServer
Once you’ve done this, all subsequent screen shots you take in QuickTime will be full images without the border or drop shadow, even if you reboot.
If you want to revert the changes, just re-type the two lines above, substituting “FALSE” for “TRUE”.