This is a guide to using VirtualDub to pre-process your video files before converting them to AMV. It will give you some knowledge of how to select and set various filters to adjust your video. By changing color saturation, resizing, cropping, de-interlacing etc. you can improve the quality and size of your AMV video files. VirtualDub can be used on a limited number of file formats so I find it easier to convert DVD's, rmbv, mp4 etc to AVI format prior to using VirtualDub.

You can download VirtualDub from HERE
You will need about 10GB free space on your PC for a full lenght movie.

Load your AVI into VirtualDub.



Press CTRL-F to open the Filters window or select filters from the Video menu.



Pressing the ADD button will present you with the filters available.




Firstly select the Resize filter,and enter your players screen size.
I use 160x120 for full screen 1.8 LC, 128x128 or 128x96 for 1.5 LCD.
Select "Precise bicubic (A=-1.00) Filter Mode.Then OK.



Press the Cropping button you can now remove unwanted areas like the black lines from the top and bottom of movies. In most cases what ever I crop from top and bottom I also crop the same amount from the sides so as to keep roughly a 4x3 aspect ratio. If the picture is to wide it will be compressed and everything will appear stretched and thin. For this example no top and bottom cropping is needed but I will still crop the sides by 40PX. press Ok and exit.



Now ADD the De-interlace filter and select the "Blend fields together" option.



ADD the Brightness and Contrast filter, I adjust Brightness down one increment and Contrast up one increment. You may need to adjust depending on your players Brightness setting.



ADD the HSV Adjust filter and adjust Saturation 10-15 percent. This will make the colours a little more vivid on the small screen.



Finally ADD the sharpness filter, a setting of 15 works for me and makes the picture crisper and more defined.



That is all the filters I use but if you want to flip or rotate etc just add the filters you want.
If you press the output preview button the video will play and you can see the adjustments you have made.



Now to reduce the size of your video you can set the start and finish points and remove credits and branding from the video.

Move the slider to the where you want the video to start and press the (Mark In) arrow



Move the slider to where you want the video to finish and press the (Mark Out) arrow. You will now see your selection highlighted



Select Video>Full Processing Mode (To use all the filters you have selected) and Audio>Full Processing Mode (To keep audio\video syncronized)



Finally select File>Save As AVI or Save As>Segmented AVI ( I use this when saving full lenght movies and split it into 4 or 5 pieces. Then if I want to resume viewing say in the middle of the movie I can just select the 3rd piece rather than have to Fast Forward the the first half of the movie).



This example is about 45 minutes of Video , will take just over 8 minute to process and the output file will be almost 4GB



You can then convert the finished file to AMV.

SAMPLE: The image on the left is a direct to AMV conversion



Enlarged 2X





The settings can then be saved to file and loaded again for your next project.
The settings I have used here work for me but do not cover all that are available. Experiment with the settings till you find the ones that work best for you.

28-7-06 If your AMV conversions are skipping every few seconds you can fix this by setting the frame rate in VirtualDub to the same as your AMV conversions. To find out what speed your AMV are running at play one on your PC with the AMVPlayer. While it is running right click on the picture and select properties which will show you the FPS. To set the same Frames Per Second in VirtualDub pressing CTRL+R will open the frame rate setting. In the Frame Rate Conversion box select Convert to fps and then enter your desired frame rate 10, 12 ,16 what ever your AMV were running at.

If you find your sound is out of sync on your AMV conversions you can adjust that in VirtualDub as well. Press CTRL+I to bring up the Audio Interleaving settings and set Audio Scew Correction to + settings if your audio is early or - settings if your audio is late. (eg. +300 or -300) Settings are in milliseconds and you will have to experiment to find the right settings for you.

i have written a batch file that will automate cropping or letterboxing videos, so you can simply right click on the vid and open with the batch file.

i haven't added any brightness/contrast or other fancy adjustments, but you can do that yourself if you feel.

http://forum.s1mp3.org/viewtopic.php?p=14408#14408

Thank you tadad1 and dazonic,

I´m using your settings to convert my videos,
let me see the output file....

thanks again

guivarrichio

Did I read it right?

The output 160x128 tiny little 45 miutes video will have 4 GB?!?!?! :roll:

Gosh, after running it through AMV Converter, how big will it be?

Victor1980, After conversion to AMV (16fps) it was only 127MB

hi tadad1, I converted a 2.5 MB avi file using virtual dub as u have illustrated the resulting file had a size of 82.5MB.
I was wondering what will happen if I convert a 700 MB

The strange thing is: The files keep coming out too large! My AMV converter4.0 has de quality options disabled. Even so, I just converted:

a 5 minutes long 20MB video, turned it into a 450MB 160x128 AVI file, and converted it into a 28MB AMV file. :(

The same 20MB file, converted to AMV also goes up to 28! Most of the files I convert goes to 40% the original size...

By the way, is there a way to increase volume through VirtualDub? EDIT: Found it! only "problem" now is still the filesize. you mentioned a 45 minutes, high quality file for less then 150MB

Victor1980 & prasanna,

The process I have outlined in the guide is to provide the best quality AMV I have been able to obtain. When I worked on this process I was not concerned with file size or drive usage so no compression is used in the pre-process which is why the end .avi is so large. So I did a comparison experiment with and without compression and here are my findings.


Examples 1

Original file: Size 512x384 23.98fps
Lenght 42:15 min\sec
File size 345MB

After VirtualDub all settings as above + set output frame rate to 16fps

Processed file: Size 160x120 16fps
Length 42:15 min\sec
File size 2.21GB

AMV Conversion 3.57:
Size 160x120 16fps
Length 42:16 min\sec
File size 127MB

Example 2

Original file: Size 512x384 23.98fps
Lenght 42:15 min\sec
File size 345MB

After VirtualDub all settings as above + set output frame rate to 16fps + Compression Xvid MPEG-4 Codec


Processed file: Size 160x120 16fps
Length 42:15 min\sec
File size 56.35MB

AMV Conversion 3.57:
Size 160x120 16fps
Length 42:16 min\sec
File size 142MB

Sample: Example 2 using compression is on the left



Enlarged 2X



As you can see using compression during the VirtualDub process reduces the output file from 2.21GB to 56.35MB however the end result produces a poorer quality AMV file but also to my suprise increases the file size by 15MB.

Hi,
My player LCd is about 1.8inch. I ever tried using version 3.57
to convert into amv file but I can only choose up to 128x96 which is very small not full screen.
Dont understand how come you all can choose full screen?


I tried using virtualdub to resize to 160x120(1.8inch LCD)and save the video file into avi format. After that use amv convertion tool v3.57 to convert into amv file , the video is still very small not full screen.
How Can I increase it to full screen?
Can anyone help?


thanks!

sharonx87, You need to edit transformsetup.ini, this post will give you details
http://www.mympxplayer.com/viewtopic.php?t=449

Hi tadad1, thanks for posting the results.In my opinion if u have atlest 10GB disk space we can convert without any compression.Since I dont have so much free disk space I have to compromise with the quality of the video by going for Xvid AVI compression.
By the way how much time did it take for the coversion of ur file?

prasanna

prasanna, You should also try some of the other compression codecs that still reduce the output size I later tried Huffyuv and Indeo Video codecs and they about halved the size of the output and the final AMV was better quality.

It seems the time it takes depends on the compression codec used with the example the longest took about 14 minutes the shortest about 8 minutes. I can do a full lenght movie with no compression in between 17 to 20 minutes depending on the lenght of the movie.

Hi tadad1,
I have a doubt....does virtual dub converts VOB files or we need to first convert them to AVI and then use Virtual dub.
B'coz I have lot of DVDs i want them to convert them.
Presently I use DVD decrypter to copy the files in to the drive and then use pocketdivxencoder or other to convert them to AVI and them convert them to AMV.

prasanna

prasanna, no VirtualDub does not convert .vob files.
I finally bought a copy of Slysoft CloneDVDMobile and DVD43 which rips a full movie to avi in about 30 minutes. Was well worth the 40 US dollars.

Tadad1, Can u post the steps u follow in ripping the DVD using the software mentioned by u.So that will be helpful for ppl like us.
Thanks in advance

Prasanna