I apologize if this has already been asked.

I am growing extremely frustrated. I can take screencaps from a dvd, but I can't seem to do it with video files downloaded from the internet. Could someone explain to me how to do screencaps in windows movie maker? I'm running windows vista...does anyone know about that version of MM? I have no idea how to make animated gifs that don't suck, and from video files, I can't at all.

I tried taking a video clip from youtube and converting it to avi, then opening it in windows movie maker. I selected the part I wanted to turn into an animation but I don't know how to convert the file into something I can work with in Animation Shop 3. I am very new to all of this and would greatly appreciate help.