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Unofficial VirtualDub Support Forums > Newbie Questions > Bring Back My Color?

Posted by: Anjalena Jul 31 2010, 03:51 PM

I'm new to this application... and brand new to video compression in general. Basically I watched a Youtube video to decide on settings since I would have absolutely NO clue what to do.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9XOgnaJ_Hs&fmt=22 -- there's the vid in case anyone wanted to see which settings I used. - I ended up keeping the original video size because my resolution is 1280x1028 so resizing to 720p size just made it look bad. Also I changed to Mpeg-3 audio because the audio setting the video person chose made my compressed video sound kinda crap.)

The resulting compressed video using the above video tutorial was pretty good. I like it fine... with the exception of the color, which looks pretty faded. I know that compression means it has to remove some stuff, so I understand that color would be one of the things it might lessen. But I'm trying to make a few videos of me traveling through a few areas in World of Warcraft because my Mom has no concept of what a role-playing game is, how it works, what it looks like. Heh, these past 5 years I've been mentioning the name of the game to her, I just assumed she knew what it was. But she apparently thought it was some sort of card game or something. *laugh*

Anyway, one of the main things I want her to see is the artistic beauty of some of the areas. I still have the original videos, of course. I just need to know how to compress them so that it keeps much of the pretty colors and music.

Can anyone guide me on how to do that? (in Video Compression for Dummies terms, pweeze?)

Thanks all. And hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend!

Posted by: dloneranger Jul 31 2010, 04:20 PM

There's nothing in the instruction video or the compressor used that actually 'removes colour'

There could be a few reasons for it though
But that means explaining a lot of stuff

So for the sake of simpleness, try this

In the video

When you open the 'color depth' box
Don't pick autoselect, instead, pick 4:4:4 planar YCbRc (YV24)
(Don't load your video into virtualdub until you have set this, as it only affects the next video loaded)

Load the video in and add the resize filter

Then add another filter
Look for 'HSV Adjust', and add it
Press the configure button to get it's dialog up
Press 'preview' to see the image

Now, you can play with the sliders there
Hue changes the colours (not what you want)
Saturation changes 'how' colourful it is
Value adjusts the brightness

Then save the video and see how it looks

While you're trying to get it right, you don't have to save the whole thing
You can speed it up by just saving a small part of it

To do that, move to the beginning of what you want to save and press the 'mark-in' button
(It's the 12'th button - looks like half an arrow pointing left)
Then go to the end of the bit you want to save and press the 'mark-out' button
(The 13'th button - looks like half an arrow pointing right)

Then when you save the video, it'll only save the bit in-between the 2 markers

To remove the selection, you can go to the edit menu and click 'Clear selection'

------------------------------------
Other filters you might want to play with are the brightness/contrast one, and it's big brother 'levels'

If it's still looking a bit horrible afterwards, it could be your graphics cards 'overlay adjustment' has some odd settings

Posted by: rjisinspired Jul 31 2010, 04:26 PM

How about your filter? It's very configurable and has different modes of brightness as well.

http://forums.virtualdub.org/index.php?act=ST&f=7&t=18945&st=0&#entry80648

Posted by: dloneranger Jul 31 2010, 04:45 PM

(And now updated to disable the effect or only show it on half the image)

But that means explaining how to add plugins ;-)

So......

There are lots of addons for virtualdub
When you download one, you'll get a file ending with .vdf

This file has to go in the right place so virtualdub can find it
You need to open the folder that has virtualdub in it
In this place, there should be a folder called 'plugins'
If there isn't, make a new folder and call it plugins
Open that plugins folder and move the file ending with .vdf into it

Then, when you next start virtualdub, the plugin will be added to the list of available filters you can choose from

----------------------------------
If your windows explorer doesn't show file extensions, you might not see the .vdf at the end of the filename
Or you might have downloaded a zip archive
In that case, just move whatever is inside the downloaded zip into that plugins folder

Posted by: Anjalena Aug 1 2010, 10:29 PM

Just stopped by to see if I had any replies. Thank you guys very much. I'm mostly following along with your instructions right now... having just read them and not opened VirtualDub just yet. I'm sure after I do open it and go into the menus, all that you've said will be clear.

I'm a pretty smart cookie and been farting around in Windows applications since the early - mid 90's. So that helps a lot. (learned a lot just by fiddling around in menus and seeing what things do in different programs.) But this particular software deals with a technical subject that I'm completely unfamiliar with, hence the dummy aspect. *giggle*

However, at this particular moment in time, I've had about 3 hours sleep in the last... uhh... *thinks* 30+ hours I think. Yep, another dummy aspect. *rofl* Anyway, so my brain is barely processing right now. And hopefully all of this made sense and didn't sound like I was saying "Don't tell me how to do things. I'm not an idiot." I didn't mean it that way. You guys gave me exactly what I wanted... precise directions. I was just, in essence, trying to say that your instructions were really good and with my knowledge of Windows and menus, I don't think I'll have any problems following them. Does that make sense?

Wow... I'm surprised I can form basic sentences at this point. Ugh... too tired. Trying to stay up until a little later in the evening so I can sleep at night, rather than going back to my old habit of just sleeping any old time, day or night. And I'm rambling, which I tend to do anyway. So... without further adieu... I'm gonna go grab my freshly cooked Lipton noodles with chicken and veggies, and go watch Buffy or something that I need no actual brain power to understand. *grin*

After I wake up tomorrow, I'll try this stuff out and post back with my results and any other questions. Hope you guys had a great weekend! =)

Posted by: dloneranger Aug 1 2010, 11:12 PM

Hope it goes well
I usually go overboard on step by step instructions
But it's better to have too much information than not enough

Let us know if there's no improvement and we'll look at further steps

Some possible reasons for a washed out look are

1) You're converting the video from RGB to YUV
Most video compressors use YUV - xvid, divx h264 etc
Screen capture compressors usually use RGB
RGB uses three 0 to 255 numbers to describe each pixel's colour
YUV uses one 16-to-235 number and two 16-to-240 numbers
This might lose some precision and contrast if it's not converting correctly

2) The decompressor used by whatever's playing back the video
Some video players use seriously weird settings......
They can be doing odd things like making the colours look more 'natural' for films
Automatically turning down the saturation when they find red jumpers glowing etc
Which is fine for movies and tv, but not so good for screen captures where the red is supposed to be glowing
You'll find a lot of people on video forums use Media Player Classic
(It looks very basic, but is extremely good)

3) Your video card
Your video card could be using a hardware overlay for displaying YUV video
If that's not set correctly it can make video's look awful
It's usually an option hidden somewhere in the display drivers, that needs to be reset back to 'normal'

Related to that is virtualdubs own display code
In the menu - options -> preferences -> main
Output colour depth should be set to 'Match display depth' or '24 bit (Truecolour)
In the menu - options -> preferences -> display
There are a lot of options in the 'Use DirectX for display areas'
Depending on your video card, you might want to turn them all off or on

Watching Buffy? The vampire slayer?
I once watched the seven series in one whole go with naps inbetween series :-)

Posted by: Anjalena Aug 4 2010, 04:04 PM

There is no such thing as overboard with step-by-step instructions. You did it perfectly. =)

Life and health have been frustrating lately, so I still haven't gotten to the video. But I will. Right now I'm working on 4 hours sleep. As soon as my PCA gets done for the day, I'm going back to sleep! Heh.

As for video players, I usually use KMPlayer, though I do have Media Player Classic - Home Cinema as a backup. My son loves KMPlayer and set it up for me. I love being able to skip 5 or 30 seconds with the arrow keys. And there are a few other nuances that are nice. But I do still like MPC.

My video cards are both nVidia GeForce 8600GTs strapped together in SLI configuration, though I have the SLI function turned off cuz I was having some graphics issues here and there.

OMG another Buffy geek! SHINY!

I've probably watched all 7 seasons a total of 20+ times. Maybe 30, I dunno. *laugh* Never done it in one go, though. Props! I love the first 3 seasons best. And after season 5, the show just gets too dark and loses too much of its levity. Season 6, especially, is particularly hard to get through sometimes (setting the awesome musical episode aside). One of the episodes I hated with a passion the first time I watched Buffy was "Normal Again", where they basically call the entire premise of the series into question... is it real or is she just in a nut-house making it all up? And the fact that Joss leaves it very open to interpretation at the end of the episode just didn't help.

Ugh, I better get up from here and get some work done. Here it is, already the 4th of the month, and I haven't done my bills yet. Bad me.

Posted by: Anjalena Aug 25 2010, 02:19 PM

Sorry it's taken so long for me to get back. Life stuff.

That Multi-Adjust filter is great! I've just gotten to working with the video this morning finally and I'm still tinkering but it's really close to what I want. So thank you so much!!

Also, a quick query. When you choose "Save as AVI" to make it convert the video for ya, a little window pops up that shows the progress and other things. How do I set it up so that it always keeps my settings... like for previewing (Show input video and Show output video). I always want that off. Is there a way to fix it so I don't have to uncheck those boxes every time? =)

Oh, here's another question. Do you -have- to have a resize filter? Cuz I just removed it and just left the Multi-Adjust filter and the output is jerky. Also, the file jumped up to 1.55 GB for that 14 second segment I'm testing this on. But the original file is 7:50 minutes long and is only 3.46 GB. ?? How's that work? =(

Posted by: dloneranger Aug 25 2010, 03:21 PM

Glad you liked my filter, I had a lot of fun writing it

You don't have to resize a video, that usually depends on who's going to be playing it back
If it's for youtube then you can resize it to a youtube friendly size yourself, or youtube will reconvert it to get it's own preferred size
(I don't know offhand what sizes youtube likes... a search on the site, or google should give some results though)

If the files coming out huge, did you remember to pick a compressor for the video?
And one for the audio if it's uncompressed as well (you'd have to check the file information on the file menu for the video/audio properties)

The status window doesn't let you have the previews turned off by default when you 'save file'
It does, if you're using the job queues, but that's mainly for lining up a lot of videos to convert and getting virtualdub to go through the list 1 by 1

Posted by: Anjalena Aug 25 2010, 07:53 PM

Ya know what's funny? I never realized until earlier today that the guy who'd been helping me (you) was the same one who wrote that awesome filter. I'm so unobservant sometimes. *laugh*

Umm, no, I didn't pick a compressor or anything else really. I thought that you set those up the first time you opened virtualdub and that was that. Heh... I'm silly. Which would you recommend?

I'm not making this vid for YouTube really. I'm making it for my Mom so she can have an idea what World of Warcraft looks like. She has absolutely no concept of role-playing games really. I think she thought it was some kind of card game or something. *rofl* I wanted her to see it's a big, beautiful world that you can travel around in and see creatures and fight monsters and stuff. That's why I wanted to keep the color, so she could see the pretty. =)
(I'd just show her, but I live in Maine and she lives in Georgia. It's a bit of a drive. *grin*)

Posted by: dloneranger Aug 25 2010, 08:25 PM

Things you'll need before you start, if you don't have them already
xvid video compressor
http://www.free-codecs.com/koepi_xvid_download.htm
lame mp3 codec
[URL=http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17024916/MyUploadedStuff/SetupLamex64x32.zip[/URL]

You'll probably be ok with the frame size you have then, as long as her pc's fast enough to keep up (built in the last 5 years or so)

The usual suspects for compression are xvid or divx
Xvid's free so you might as well use that

Before you save, select xvid in the video menu->compression
Press configure and set it up
YouTube has walkthroughs for the settings, but if you're just after quality here's some basic settings

Encoding type -> single pass
Target quantizer -> 4.0 (smaller numbers give better quality)
Zone options -> Tick 'begin with keyframe' and 'chroma optimizer enabled'
Quality preset's' more' button -> motion search precision ->6 ultra high (this is it's slowest speed, but better quality)
Quality preset's' more' button -> tick use chroma motion

Different version of the xvid configuration dialog's have different layout's and names, so yours may vary!!

For audio, if it's uncompressed
(file menu->file information->audio compression will say pcm(uncompressed) )
Pick
Audio menu->full processing
Audio menu->compression
On the next dialog, choose 'Lame mp3' on the left
After picking 'Lame mp3', choose a compression rate on the right hand side
Look for 128K CBR, it's a decent compromise but if it doesn't sound good, choose a higher number

After you've set those all up, save the file and see how well it turn out

If the file's too big for sending over the internet, then resizing it to a smaller size will make the file smaller, and so will changing the xvid target quantizer
(the quanitzer is a balancing act, smaller numbers = better image/larger file, larger numbers=worse image/smaller file)

Good luck, and hope it turns out shiny