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

The World of VirtualDub


We will assume you’re a novice at digital video editing: you have never used VirtualDub, and know nothing of the world of VirtualDub beyond having heard about or downloaded it. When you’re finished with this book, you’ll know all you need to and more.

VirtualDub supplements your main video editing software. It can be used to do some simple editing, but it’s more about what you can do with the filters that have already been developed and the countless possibilities for new ones. The filters are those included in the software, provided by third parties, or developed by you. The world of VirtualDub is wide open to use, learn from, or contribute to.

A filter is anything that changes a frame or multiple frames of a video. You can apply one or many at the same time. You select the VirtualDub filter(s), choose filter settings, and VirtualDub applies them to the frames of the input file as it makes (renders) a new file. The change might be the addition of text as you saw above, a color change, the addition of a logo in the corner, a rotation by a few degrees, cropping—anything you can think of wanting or needing to do to a video file. Some changes fix problems and others enhance the video by achieving your desired effect.

Software

Avery Lee, who later donated it to the public domain, via the Free Software Foundation ( http://www.fsf.org/), started VirtualDub.

The General Public Licenses are designed to make sure you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), receive source code or get it if you want it, change the software, or use pieces of it in new free programs. Use this freedom to the fullest.

VirtualDub has been adopted whole-heartedly and developed further. Features continue to be added or developed and other related applications are being spun off.

As you read through this book, you’ll learn to use VirtualDub as well as encounter two popular complementary programs:

VDubMod

Think of this as a super version of VirtualDub. If you can’t do something with VirtualDub, try VDubMod. For example, if you open an MPEG-2 file in VirtualDub you’ll get an error message about no video frames being found in it. Try this in VDubMod and it’ll open fine. (This, however, isn’t a guarantee.)

Each computer has many video and audio codecs on it to render or play an audio or video file. They work in the background, but sometimes there are software conflicts that need to be resolved. Dig in and try things—use all your tools and you’ll sort those that work on your system from those that don’t. VDubMod with its expanded set of features will help.

AviSynth

VirtualDub and VDubMod are applications you open as usual, and work with in windows. AviSynth is a bit harder to grasp as it works more behind the scenes. It’s a frame server.

A frame server takes the video frames from a movie file and feeds or serves them to the software that needs them for playback or processing/editing.

You can use AviSynth in two ways. The easiest way is to simply change the extension of a video file to read .avs. Open such a file and the frames will be obtained by AviSynth and passed to the default associated player, such as the Windows Media Player.

The other way is to create a simple text-based script file using Notepad. Enter some commands in the script file, give the script file an .avs extension, and AviSynth will execute the commands as it passes the frames on. A very simple script is a two liner, the first one pointing to the source file, and the second one saying ‘reverse’. When AviSynth serves the frames to the player or editing software, it’ll be serving them in reverse order: an effect sought after by many, but perhaps not included in their main editor.

You can use script commands to do lots of fun and useful things.

Users

There are some great and very established online websites and forums to get the latest in software downloads, follow continued developments, and get support. Here are some:

  • http://forums.virtualdub.org/, started in mid-2002, has over 13,000 members. In addition to the forums in English, there are ones for Spanish, French, and German. The overall administrator is the extremely active ChristianHJW.

  • Donald Graft’s website http://neuron2.net/ provides a source to download plug-ins for VirtualDub and AviSynth.

    Doom9’s forums at http://forum.doom9.org/ include two for AviSynth usage and development, and another for VirtualDub and VDubMod. With the latest tally showing over 50,000 posts on these three forums, you won’t run out of reading material.

  • The official VirtualDub site page at http://www.virtualdub.org /virtualdub_docs provides comprehensive online documentation.

  • The AviSynth site at http://www.avisynth.org/ has information about filter expressions and all aspects of AviSynth, including its official manual.