hi, im having a problem with windows clipboard. Im thinking maybe it's some security feature built into windows, idk. what im trying to do is take a simple screen shot of a movie so that I can set it as my desktop. Simple enough right, well it's not. I took the screen shot with the standard print screen function, pasted it to a new image, added some extra graphics to it, saved it and closed out of photoshop (I made sure all layers were merged). Well, when I tried to open the image backup, all that was saved was the extra gfx I had added and a black background! I retried it several times, but no luck. Now, im just getting p****d. Any ideas as to what the problem may be?

Your graphics card is probably "overlaying" the video so that it can add its own effects, like brightness and hue adjustments. This means windows won't get a proper screenshot of the video, it'll just get the black background. It looks like you've got a proper screenshot because, as long as your video player is open, the video is still being overlayed onto that background colour.

You'll need to use the actual video player to take a screenshot. It'll be different depending on what you're using the play the video, but VLC is a good, free player that I know can take screen captures (check the advanced options in Settings/Preferences/Interface/Hotkeys for the command).

Hope that helps.

Or turn hardware acceleration off in your video player of choice(remember to turn it back on after the screenshot is taken).