Powerful freebies – Joe
Summary: Three freeware programs for quick and easy video edits.
VirtualDub is a long standing favorite among videophiles and with good reason – it’s simple to use but very powerful and has LOTS of additional filters for more editing options:
“VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.”
Check out the filters in the above link – there are 129 available. There is also a support forum HERE and a very nice video tutorial HERE. Finally if you really want to wring the most out of it, there is a book entitled Learning VirtualDub: The complete guide to capturing, processing and encoding digital video. There is also a utility called VirtualDubMod which purports to add new features.
I found VirtualDub to be very easy to quickly edit avi files – cutting and pasting segments or deleting single video frames is a snap.
The opening screen:
Move the cursor to “File” and you get this:
When you open a video file, you see two screens – one for the loaded image and one for the altered image:
By using the arrow keys on your keyboard, you can step through the video file frame-by-frame; in some of the videos I have, sometimes one frame is too dark or light as the scene shifts – deleting this one frame smooths out the video nicely.
You can get detailed information about the file:
The following two composite images show all the options within the program:
Under “Video”, “Filters”, you can select from a wide range of effects:
You can alter the video file as follows:
And when you’re finished editing the file, you can save it in a variety of formats:
For a freeware program, you get a LOT of capabilities for basic video editing functions.
One of the issues you may encounnter when editing video files is converting from one format to another. SUPER © Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer:
“If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file, without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER © is all you need. It is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click. It plays & converts very fast full length movies to any other format without any time or function limitation. SUPER © does NOT require any additional external codec to be installed, absolutely nothing. Necessary codecs are built in!”
Once launched the following displays:
You can see from this that there are more options here than you may know what to do with. Drop down to the last box and when you right click, you get this menu:
Finally, here is the list of output formats from which you can select:
This is a VERY powerful program that you give you tons of flexibility for your videos at no cost.
Sherlock is a handy little utility that will list out all the codecs on your PC:
You can quickly find out what you have and what you may for your videoproject.
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