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

How Filters Work


Filters could be seen as small plug-in programs that integrate mathematical or logical procedures. Some of them work on a per-frame basis while others have different temporal dependencies. Resizing and histogram adjustment are examples of the first category while de-interlacing and motion blur (which depend on more than one frame in time) belong to the second category. They are very useful because:

  1. 1. They can be combined in a chain fashion (the relative order can be important) applying various effects without producing more than one output.

  2. 2. They are easy to use although they provide essential functions.

  3. 3. They are modular so you can easily add or remove them.

  4. 4. Many of them are free. Check out http://neuron2.net/.

Pipelines

It is always useful to understand the notion of the pipeline. It sounds too technical to be easily understood, but in fact, it is a very simple concept to grasp. Let us suppose that we want to distribute our video over the Internet, but since our web...