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

Extracting Stills


Saving still images of your video can be very useful if you want to automate processes like making thumbnails of a video file to post on the Internet. Using VirtualDub, you can extract the stills and use a batch file to automate the thumbnail creation.

You can extract the stills of the whole video if you like, but beware of the file sizes; VirtualDub can export to Bitmaps (uncompressed) and TARGA/JPEG (compressed). In either case, the collection might occupy a lot of disk space depending on the frame size, length, and compression quality. Try to limit the operation to the specific range in which you are interested. You can select the range you want using your chosen method.

When you have selected the region of interest, select File | Save image sequence. The following configuration dialog will appear:

Start by selecting the output format—BMP, TARGA, or JPEG. If you are using JPEG, adjust the quality factor (over 90 will give high-quality stills). Secondly, use the browse...