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

Example Processing


There is nothing more enjoyable than learning video processing with visual aids and practical examples. Not only do you become familiar with the techniques, but you also have fun doing it. It is highly recommended that you install VirtualDub, otherwise capturing can be somewhat tedious and unpleasant since there is no potential for innovation. From here on, we enter another realm and it would be best for you to try out the examples in the text as you read through.

We are going to use a video I recorded with my digital (miniDV) camcorder in summer ‘04 from which we’ll extract little tasks. I have imported the video on my computer through FireWire and it is stored in the DV format, taking up 4.38GB for 21:02 minutes worth of video (inc. sound). I bought the camcorder in Europe so it records in interlaced PAL at 25 frames per second. There is not much else that we need to know about the source right now. Launch VirtualDub—use the File | Open video file menu or press Ctrl+O...