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 8. Advanced Topics

Now that we know the basics of applying filters to our video and more, it is time to delve into some of the more advanced topics such as frame rates and interlaced sources. We will look into the details of converting from one format to another (also known as transcoding) and understand how it fits in with processing/filtering.

After reading this chapter, the following will be clear:

  • Why analog television is the way it is and how digital pictures have inherited from it

  • How to append videos of different formats by changing the frame rate of the source video

  • How to change the playback rate

  • How to change the number of frames per second of video to reduce the processing complexity or for other reasons

  • How to control the editing process efficiently to preserve video quality and save processing time

Color Television

Previously in this book you have seen the word NTSC, which might have looked like another obscure and cryptographic acronym for something that was designed to make...