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

Summary


Chapter 8 rounds up the features of VirtualDub related to video-specific processing. We discussed:

  • Why the different video formats/standards like PAL and NTSC exist and their relative properties

  • How to identify the video format of a particular video

  • How to distinguish between the playback rate of a video and the actual frame rate and how to alter either of these

  • How interlacing works and how to visually identify it, as well as methods of removing the artifacts it introduces when played back on progressive displays

  • The importance of calculations in video and how to minimize the degradation of video evident when processing and compressing video

  • How to fix broken video files

  • How to override the (de)compression color space to circumvent bugs in codecs

You should congratulate yourself for making it this far; some of the concepts introduced in this chapter are quite technical and difficult to understand!

understand!

understand!