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

Capture Settings


All options we need for capturing (from configuration to starting the real job) lie in the Capture menu. Pressing F6 (Capture | Capture video) or F5 (compatibility mode) starts the actual video capturing.

Before doing this, however, we need to do some configuration in the Capture menu:

Press F9 (or choose Capture | Settings) to activate the Capture Settings window. For standard videos (PAL and NTSC), we should set different values in this window. For example, in order to capture for the PAL system we should use the following settings:

There are four controls in the Capture options group. Selecting Capture audio saves audio signals too, and activating Wait for OK to capture will show a message box like the one above, after pressing F5 or F6. For continuing capture, we press OK.

For NTSC, the suitable settings are:

The most important control in this group is Frame rate, which is used to set the video capturing frame rate. It is possible to define frame rates with up to four...