Book Image

Learning VirtualDub: The Complete Guide to Capturing, Processing and Encoding Digital Video

Book Image

Learning VirtualDub: The Complete Guide to Capturing, Processing and Encoding Digital Video

Overview of this book

VirtualDub is one of the most popular video processing applications for Windows. As an open source application, it's free, and is constantly updated and expanded by an active community of developers and experts. VirtualDub is particularly popular for capturing video from analogue sources such as video tape, cleaning up the image and compressing it ready for distribution over the Internet. This book provides a rapid and easy to use tutorial to the basic features of VirtualDub to get you up and running quickly. It explains how to capture great quality video from various sources, use filters to clean up the captured image and add special effects. The book also shows how to use VirtualDub to cut and paste video to remove or insert sequences, including removing ad breaks or trailers. It goes on to cover the art of effective encoding and compression, so you end up with great quality videos that won't hog your bandwidth forever. VirtualDub is the fastest and most effective way to capture, process and encode video on your PC. This book gets you started fast, and goes on to give you full control of all the features of this legendary tool.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning VirtualDub
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction

Chapter 2. Video Capture Equipment

Before I start talking about capturing equipment, I would like to draw your attention to various video-saving media. These media can be divided into analog and digital resources. Various magnetic tapes, including VHS and Hi8, are examples of analog-storing media. In these resources audio and video data are stored in the form of magnetic fields on a ribbon or positive film. Their quality will degrade with time and we need to digitize them in order to prevent losing video quality.

Digitizing is the process of capturing movie data from an analog source (like old movie media or a TV channel/ satellite receiver), converting it to a series of zeros and ones, and finally saving this on a digital media like CD or DVD.

Other than maintenance of movie quality, is there any advantage for capturing analog movies? Yes. Consider the size of a VHS cassette and compare it with a CD or DVD. Can you imagine the space required for you to archive 100 movies as VHS? Now imagine...