I have a large collection of digital video files and it’s hard to keep track of it all— especially the anime series whose sheer number of episodes and Japanese titles sometimes make recall difficult for me. (wTwNjzVFVU)
I had been looking for an automated way to create a thumbnail sheet graphic for each video file containing screen shots from the video but couldn’t find anything that fit the bill until I found this neat Windows command line utility called Movie Thumbnailer (aka Mtn).
Mtn is a no-nonsense, efficient and fast utility that utilizes the open source audio/video converter FFMPEG to generate its thumbnails.
Mtn Output Example
(I didn’t pick the scene with the boobs! This was a blind capture! Honest! :-P)
Mtn’s greatest asset is its ability to work with almost any video file your system is capable of playing. The other techniques/utilities I’ve tried can’t do this, even when I’ve got all the proper codecs installed and working correctly.
Mtn includes functions to control screen shot size, contact sheet size, capture interval, scene detection (including blank screen) tweaking, file information insertion, time code insertion and so on.
I’m going to be using Mtn to create “blind” screen shot contact sheets for my reviews. Granted, it’s not as concise as hand picking frames, is lower resolution per screen shot and there’s a risk that it might reveal a few spoiler scenes (I’ll be careful about those), it does save me a considerable amount of time as well as reducing screen shot management to just one file per video.
Normally I’d have to spend an hour or two “scrubbing” back and forth in a video editor to find the right screen shots, tweaking each screen shot for web use, upload them to the blog, then use a third party in-line gallery plug-in to format everything in the article.
Doing this for every episode of every anime series I plan on blogging adds up to a lot of hours just managing screen shots.
With Mtn, I can run it on a video file (or whole directory tree of files) and it’s done in no time. Plus having just one contact sheet per video simplifies file management.
I’m not too concerned with the content of each screen shot (if it’s not a spoiler scene) since I use screen shots to primarily give viewers more of a general feel for the art style and content of the video being reviewed as opposed to showing very specific scenes. If I need to show something specific, then I’ll use the manual method.
If you’re writing video reviews or you need to catalogue your video file collection, check out Mtn. You’ll need FFMPEG as well. Both are no bloat/no footprint installations.
There’s even a third party GUI for Mtn if the command line scares you. 
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