Darren

If you are working on a video project there are sometimes parts you want to cut out to make it "more pretty". I will give you some pointers how you can do this easily using Virtual DUB.
By Darren Wilden

If you do not have Virtual DUB installed I recommend downloading it at their website. It is freeware and a great tool for minor video projects.

Editing the movie.

Sometimes when I work on some 3D animated projects, I render a scene and sometimes (or should I say most of the times ) there are things I might need to cut out of the scene. Feel free to edit my project. You can download my 3D movie here - 3.49 MB AVI file (DivX 5.03 codec or later required).


Tutorial image 1 - A single frame from the video.

Now let's get started. First open Virtual DUB and open the video file you wish to edit (if you are not using mine). To give you some idea on how the interface works take a look at Tutorial image 2.


Tutorial image 2 - The interface.

You have opened the file and now you want to cut out a selection from the movie (probably my name - just admit it well let's just do it then). Make sure the Timeline marker is at frame 0 and click on the first selection marker (no. 1).


Tutorial image 3 - Editing tools.

Now drag your Timeline marker to frame 610 and click the second selection marker (no. 2). If you cannot drag your marker to the exact position, use either the Next or Previous frame button to move your Timeline marker the last remaining frames.


Tutorial image 4 - Movie selection.

Press the Delete key on your keyboard to cut out your selection. Done, you have successfully edited the movie. Now we only need to compress and save the file.

The AVI compression.

Why not just save the file and move on? Well I am afraid it doesn't work that way. If you don't compress your movie, a 3 mb compressed file can actually go to nearly a 100 mb uncompressed file, therefor compression is essential.

You can compress the avi file using the video codecs you have installed. Video codecs are compression tools for the AVI file extension, and there are many of them out there. To read more about video codecs and the FOURCC technology I recommend visiting Microsoft.

Not all video codecs are good. There are some that reduces the quality of your video to make the file size as small as possible. The MPEG-4 technology will give you the best compression and best quality. DivX offers this technology for free. I will be using DivX to compress this project.

The compression tool

From your file menu select Video and then Compression. From the list select the compression tool you wish to use. You can configure the quality of your movie with some of the codecs. Click the configure (if option is available) and change the settings for the particular codec you have chosen. Once you are done click ok.
Again from the file menu, choose Save as AVI. Once you have entered the file name and clicked ok, Virtual DUB will start to render each frame, compressing the frames using your selected codec.

When Virutal DUB completes this task, you can view your movie by locating it in the folder you saved your file in.

What else can Virtual DUB do?

Some other great things about Virtual DUB worth mentioning is the filter options. The filter options can help you increase the quality of your movie using filters like:

• Brightness/Contrast
• Sharpen
• Resize

From the file menu select Video and then Filters. To add a filter click the Add button to your right. A list of filters will appear.


Tutorial image 5 - Adding filters.

Double click on the filter you would like to add and set the values to your preferred values. If you are not sure what this means, just set a value and click ok. Click ok again to Exit the filter screen. Now drag your timeline marker and see what changes it made. If you are not satisfied with the outcome, go back to the filter screen and double clik on the filter you added and set the values differently this time. If you don't want the filter at all, simply delete it by clicking the Delete button to your right.

I suggest playing around with the filters as it's a good way to learn how you can increase the quality of your movie(s).

Why not use Windows Movie Maker?

You can use Windows Movie Maker as well, however, the WMV file extension and codec is not very popular for larger movies, but it is great for smaller web presentations. At the same time Windows Movie Maker does not offer you the same options as Virtual DUB. Also Virtual DUB isn't the most advance tool to use which is why I wanted to write this article and share with you how easy it really is.

If you really want to make professional video editing, there are tools like Pinnacle, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects which offers many other options including the ones mentioned in this tutorial. However, these are not freeware tools and they are far more advance.

There is more to Virtual DUB than meets the eye, this was just the basics.
Good luck with your editing!

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"Don't judge yourself on how far you have come,
It's better to get somewhere than nowhere"

MorphuX

Wow Video editing on a Win95 machine! You have some guts there.
I woudnt say it is impossible as you have already shown you can do it,
but as Darren had said, the DiVx codec is really a nice compression/decompression
tool for video. This will keep your files from expanding like a french bakers waistline.

I dont know of any other codecs that would play nice with your machine, but perhaps Darren does. The problem is that Win95 was never really meant to edit video or do it
cleanly and efficiently. The software is so old now too, I dont know if anyone really makes codecs that support this OS to get the most of it if you were to use it for video editing. Perhaps a google search could come in handy on this one?

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There are 10 types of people in the world today;
those that understand binary, and those that dont.

Darren

Thanks for the compliments, SunRunner Yeah, I was thinking of extending this tutorial, explaning a bit more about the filters and how you can improve the overall quality of a movie, thanks for sharing your hint though....we can't get enough of them

Microsoft codecs aint exactly the best codecs in the world, they can't offer the same compression like codecs such as DivX, however, when compressing a movie it is essential that one also remember to compress the sound. For sound compression I highly recommend MPEG Layer-3. It's a good quality which offer a high class compression.

Another Video Codec worth looking into is Xvid, which also comes as a free compressor/decompressor. It's pretty much the same as DivX and designed to work with the MPEG-4 compression. I don't know how well these tools works on a 95 platform, but as MorphuX said, Windows 95 was not designed as a multimedia platform and may therefor be lacking the improved system files found on newer platforms, which works even better with memory blocks.

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"Don't judge yourself on how far you have come,
It's better to get somewhere than nowhere"

Darren

Of course

From the menu, goto Video->Filters and click the Add button. Scroll down and locate the Rotate option. Double click on it or Click OK to bring up the options for this Filter. Select which way you want to turn your movie, and click OK. Click OK again to exit the Filter screen.

Once you have selected your compression tool (described in the tutorial, section: The compression tool) you can render the movie. From the menu select File and Save as AVI.

Thats it

Enjoy.

__________________
Project manager
Visualizer Image Group

"Don't judge yourself on how far you have come,
It's better to get somewhere than nowhere"

Pwetson

I want to put my dvd movie into my portable media player. I have it now as avi. The sound and video don't match. I want to make the sound and video match making it at the same time. I tried using virtualdub, but i'm a bit lost. How can i fix my sound and video on my video file so it will be at the same time? What are the steps?