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

Filters for Fun


The filters discussed until now improve image quality and eliminate unwanted parts from a video. But some filters simply insert special effects on the video. Even in VirtualDub we can find examples of such filters, but here we will discuss external plug-ins.

Defining Simple Transitions for Video with FadeFX

FadeFX is a plug-in for adding transition effects like fade in/out to videos. This filter (fadefx.vdf) can be downloaded from http://home.earthlink.net/~tacosalad/video/.

This plug-in has simple settings. Just specify the frames you wish to add the effect to in the Effect range group and then select the transition type from the Fade parameters group. Checking the Extend effect box will expand the effect to subsequent frames:

There are five options for fading in the FadeFX plug-in. You can see the effects in the following image:

Half Toning Video

Half toning means representing an image in circles with two solid colors and Tom Ford has developed a plug-in named Halftone...