In this section we will see how to avoid doing things that will result in a quality loss—errors common to users new to video processing. We will go a little deeper into:
Converting from one format to another—transcoding
Lossless and lossy codecs
Color spaces
Knowing about the above concepts will give you a better understanding of what is going on behind the scenes and allow you to tweak the process.
Let’s think about what happens when re-compressing video. Assume we have a video ‘V’. The owner of ‘V’ used a lossy codec to compress it at a very good quality giving another video ‘C’. You are not satisfied with ‘C’ because it is too grainy for your liking so you open it in VirtualDub, attach a smoother to the filter chain, and save it again.
Saving the video uncompressed would take too much space so we use another, or the same, lossy codec. Throughout, VirtualDub will have to decompress the video, smooth it or apply any other processing...