I was going to pull a few frames with my PC from a movie DVD and everything was working fine until I tried to make the actual files. I paused the DVD, hit print screen, opened paint, pasted the image into paint, hit save as xxx.jpg and then the screen just went black. It made a file but there was no image, just black. The workaround was to dump that clip to tape, then back to the PC into Premiere and pull the frames from the timeline which worked just fine. Is this a copy protection feature? If so, how does it work once a frame is saved as a seperate file? I figured that would only protect against copying the moving video when it's playing.

Actually, no, it isn't a copyright feature. It is a technical limitation.

Your DVD player is using a system called (video) overlay. What it
does is this. The player paints its screen with a certain color (usually
a shade of black) and then tells the video drivers to overlay the
video on that color, this is more efficient means of doing it, that's
why every serious player software (including WMP) uses it.

So when your screencapture program captures the screen FROM
the Windows (!!) buffer it is the color. It should be getting it from
the video buffer (which I'm not sure is easily possible under Windows)

However, most software DVD players (including WinDVD & PowerDVD)
have a frame export/capture function/key especially for this. Look
it up and you can export the frames you want!

Now that is interesting. I found the capture feature and it worked. It saves images as bitmaps (.bmp). Where was that when I needed it!? Thanks Rob.

this can be very interesting. lets say your surfing the net and are watching a dvd in the background ( not minimized ). It somethings happens that your dvd player software finds a matching black on a website a, and the movie appears inside a picture with the matching shade of black.

Indeed, it simply replaces a certain color. You can also do this
with another screen capture software (or your print screen button).

Play a DVD, hit print screen, continue playing the movie and open
a paint program and paste your screengrab, see what happens
with the color patch..... <g>

Rob. That was the original problem. The image disappears when you try to save it in paint from a print screen extraction. Is that what you're saying?

Yes, I was just talking about another way to have some fun with
this magic like system. For picture extractions just use the capture
function within the DVD playback software.