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

Chapter 6. Video Filtering in VirtualDub

Chapter 4 listed a number of video filters that VirtualDub provides; the time is right to familiarize ourselves with each one of them using practical examples. So far, we have only learned how to add, insert, or delete fragments of the video; we will now learn how to manipulate the actual video content using filters. Filters are entities that, given an input, will produce a well-defined output that is going to be different from the input in some well-defined way. For example, a water tap filter will receive water from the main water distribution pipe as input and after cleaning unwanted substances from the water (function of the filter) will give an output of drinking water! Going back to the world of video processing, after you have read this chapter, you will know how to:

  • Set up a sequence of filters to achieve the desired effects

  • Configure each filter independently and tweak it to best serve your purposes:

    • Clean up rough or grainy videos

    • Add details...