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

Adding More Filters to Your Collection


You can find many free filters on the Internet to add to your VirtualDub filter library. The VirtualDub homepage has a filter section that contains some extra filters that are not shipped with VirtualDub. Check http://www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_filters/.

Another shrine for VirtualDub and AviSynth filters is Donald Graft’s homepage at http://neuron2.net/.

The installation process goes from easy to non-existent for filters. Once you download the filter, usually contained in a ZIP file, follow this process:

  • Unzip the archive and locate the file with .vdf suffix.

  • There is usually an HTML or plain text (.txt) file with information and instructions on how to use the filter.

  • If you want to use the filter on rare occasions or just want to try it out, launch VirtualDub and press Ctrl+F to bring up the filter chain dialog. Use the Load feature to locate and load the filter (point to the .vdf file).

  • If you are satisfied with the results and want to have the filter...