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

Color Television


Previously in this book you have seen the word NTSC, which might have looked like another obscure and cryptographic acronym for something that was designed to make your life harder. This section aims to explain what NTSC and PAL are, why they exist, and what they imply when processing video from NTSC or PAL sources. (DVDs ship with NTSC or PAL video only.) What I have not mentioned before is a third standard named SECAM that is used in a few countries around the world.

NTSC stands for National Television System Committee; the committee introduced a TV standard sometime in the early 1950s that inherited its name. The standard was aimed towards color television and, naturally, it aimed to satisfy compatibility with black and white devices and signals. In simple terms, a color TV should be able to decode a monochrome picture signal and vice versa, a black and white TV should be able to decode a color transmission without any modifications. This requirement resulted in the YUV...