Learning VirtualDub The complete guide to capturing, processing, and encoding digital video Georgios Diamantopoulos Sohail Salehi John Buechler Birmingham - Mumbai Learning VirtualDub The complete guide to capturing, processing, and encoding digital video Copyright © 2005 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused either directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First edition: April 2005 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 1-904811-35-3 www.packtpub.com Cover Design by www.visionwt.com Credits Authors Layout Georgios Diamantopoulos Paramita Chakrabarti Sohail Salehi John Buechler Indexer Ashutosh Pande Commissioning Editor David Barnes Proofreader Chris Smith Technical Editors Ashutosh Pande Cover Designer Paramita Chakrabarti Helen Wood About the Authors Georgios Diamantopoulos was born in February 1984. Born and raised in Corinth, Greece, his scientific inclination towards computers was evident in his teenage years and he pursued his dreams by moving to Birmingham, UK to study Computer Systems Engineering in 2001. Early on in his course he expressed further interest in video editing and compression. Georgios graduated in July 2004 with an Honors degree from the University of Birmingham, where he is currently researching in the field of video compression towards a PhD degree. He has been involved with various extracurricular activities such as writing documentation for various video-editing tasks and developing a video quality assessment utility called Video Quality Studio. I would like to voice my sincere gratitude to my family and friends who have supported my choices and dreams from the start. Through the constant and honest feedback of David Barnes, my editor in Packt, this book has been better shaped to be reader-friendly and I have improved my writing style. Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to my knowledge of digital multimedia over the years—each contribution has been of great value. John Buechler, a.k.a. PapaJohn, is the prominent specialist in the community of Movie Maker 2 users (the starter video editing software included in every version of Windows XP). He co-authored Movie Maker 2—Zero to Hero, and wrote Movie Maker 2—Do Amazing Things. Other writings include a tutorial in MaximumPC and weekly newsletters. Movie Maker 2 is a basic starter application, and John encourages using other software that complements it. Virtual Dub has been a core item in his toolkit since the beginning. His books and other writings routinely include it. PapaJohn has a very active online presence, with over 10,000 posts to newsgroups and forums in the past few years. His www.papajohn.org website is an authoritative online reference for Movie Maker users. He moderates forums at www.SimplyDV.com and www.windowsmoviemakers.net, and is a regular at the microsoft.windowsxp.moviemaker newsgroup. He won the annual Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awards for three years straight: 2003 through 2005, and was further acknowledged by a special 2004 Windows 'Winny' award for outstanding community support by Microsoft. Thanks to Avery Lee for developing and sharing such great software, Christian and the community of VirtualDub users who support and expand it, and David Barnes of Packt Publishing for selecting me to write the introductory chapter. I appreciate being involved in efforts that help everyone learn more about today's wonderful digital video editing tools. Sohail Salehi was born in Mashad, Iran on March 17, 1975. He graduated in Software Engineering from Mashad University in 2000. In recent years, Sohail has contributed to over 20 books, mainly in programming and computer graphics. He has written frequent articles for 0 & 1 Magazine—an IT magazine from Ferdowsi University. You can find a complete list of his works at http://www.sohail2d.com. In the past he has worked as the Chairman in the IT department of various universities including Mashad, Ferdowsi, and the Industrial Management University. Currently he is working on IT training standards for the Iranian "Work and Science Organization". I'd like to thank my lovely wife Ghazal, who supported and accompanied me in every single step during the writing of this book. And I'd like to thank David Barnes, whose guidance helped me to improve my writing. And finally I'd like to thank all of my forum's active members and moderators who filled my absence on the board while I was working on this book. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Introducing VirtualDub 5 What is VirtualDub? 6 The World of VirtualDub 8 Software 8 VDubMod 9 AviSynth 9 Users 9 About this Book 10 Installation Preview 11 About VirtualDub 11 What VirtualDub Can Do 12 Capturing Video with VirtualDub 13 VirtualDub's Early Development Years 13 Ongoing Development 14 About VDubMod 14 About AviSynth 16 Downloading and Installing VirtualDub 17 Additional Filters 17 VirtualDub Source Code 19 Downloading and Installing VDubMod 20 Downloading and Installing AviSynth 20 Filters 24 Desktop Icons and Your Default Player 24 Summary 24 Chapter 2: Video Capture Equipment 25 Analog Video Resources 26 Digital Video Resources 28 Table of Contents The Nature of DV (Digital Video) 29 Streaming Video 30 Different Types of Capturing Devices 31 Internal versus External Equipment 33 What to Buy 34 Installing Capturing Equipment 35 Connecting Video Resources to the Capture Card 36 Final Tips and Optimizations for Better Video Capture 38 Summary 40 Chapter 3: Capture Preprocessing 41 Defining an Input Source for VirtualDub 42 File Settings 44 Audio Settings 45 Video Settings 48 Compressing Input Signals while Capturing 50 Cropping Videos 52 Removing Unwanted Noises from Videos 53 Reducing File Size 53 Unusual Resolutions and Formats 54 Histogram 54 Capture Settings 55 The Buffer 57 Saving Current Configurations for Future Reference 57 The Synchronization Problem 58 Chunks 58 Capture Duration Restrictions 59 Summary 62 Chapter 4: Processing with VirtualDub 63 VirtualDub Processing Functions 64 Append, Cut, Copy, and Paste 64 Filtering 65 Extraction of Stills 66 Sound Processing 66 ii Table of Contents Frame Rate Conversion 67 Field Interlace 68 External Processing and Frameserving 69 Example Processing 69 Summary 72 Chapter 5: Basic Functionality 73 Appending 76 Extracting Stills 77 Summary 78 Chapter 6: Video Filtering in VirtualDub 79 How Filters Work 80 Pipelines 80 Why is the Order Important 81 Built-In Filters 81 Smoothing and Blurring 84 Gaussian Blur 84 Smoothing 85 Motion Blur 86 Sharpen 87 Emboss 88 Flip 89 Rotate 90 Invert 91 Color Fill 91 Superimposing a Logo Image 93 Convolution 94 Grayscale and Black & White Video 97 Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation/Value Adjustment 98 Cropping and Resizing 101 Black Bars Wrapping the Video 101 Cropping Black Bars from the Video 103 Resizing 104 Subtitles 107 Creating the Subtitles 109 iii Table of Contents Burning the Subtitles in your Video 111 Multiplexing Subtitles in AVI using AVIMux GUI 112 External Subtitles 113 Adding More Filters to Your Collection 114 Summary 114 Chapter 7: Professional Video Editing 115 Installing a New Plug-in 115 Logo Removal Filters 116 Logo Removal with DeLogo 116 Removing Solid Elements from an Image 117 Removing Alpha-Blended Parts of a Frame 120 An Easier Way of Removing Logos 123 The Fastest Way of Removing a Logo with Logo Away 124 Using Other Logo Away Controls 126 More Convenience in Removing Logos 126 Putting Desired Information on the Video 128 Image Processing Filters 128 Decreasing Color Noise with CNR 129 The Algorithm Behind This Plug-in 129 Removing Shadows from Video 130 Filters for Fun 132 Defining Simple Transitions for Video with FadeFX 132 Half Toning Video 132 Fading between Various Hues 134 Colorizing it More 135 Pixellate Effect 135 A 1920's Cinema Plug-in 136 Summary 138 Chapter 8: Advanced Topics 139 Color Television 139 Frame Rates 140 Changing the Playback Speed of Video 141 Changing the Actual Frame Rate 143 Conversion between PAL and NTSC 144 Dealing with Interlaced Sources 145 iv Table of Contents De-Interlacing Methods 148 Field Bob 148 Field Swap 150 Hazardous Habits—How to Preserve Quality 151 Re-Compressing Video 151 VirtualDub Processing Modes 152 Recovering Damaged Files 153 Manually Controlling Input/Output Colorspaces 156 Summary 156 Chapter 9: Frameserving 159 What is AviSynth? 159 What Frameservers Can Do 160 Setting Up the VirtualDub Frameserver 161 Serving Frames with VirtualDub 162 Setting Up AviSynth 163 Introduction to AviSynth Scripts 163 Variables 164 Source Filter and Supported Formats 165 Loading Third-Party Plug-ins in AviSynth 165 Separating the Fields of an Interlaced Video 166 Summary 166 Chapter 10: Compressing: A World of Codecs 169 Interoperability and Open Standards 172 Older Codecs 173 Adding Codecs 174 Compressing Video 175 Saving the Video 176 Job Control 177 Calculating the Video and Audio Bitrate 178 Variable, Average, and Constant Bitrate Modes 180 Multi-Pass Encoding 180 Encoding with DivX 181 Encoding with XviD 185 v Table of Contents MPEG-4 in AVI Interoperability 188 Compressing the Audio 189 Multiplexing Audio and Video 191 Summary 192 Index 193 vi Introduction VirtualDub is an open source video capture and processing program.