logobossnation

. Bam! Open VirtualDub and you’re immediately hit with one of the most desolate user interfaces around.

1. Frame Rate Conversion Calculator
2. Video Frame Rate Conversion

Frame Rate Conversion Calculator

There’s no flashy logo or timeline, just a wall of gray. You’d be forgiven for thinking you made a mistake. But if you can get past the stark user interface, VirtualDub offers a highly functional and free way to create time-lapse videos. What is VirtualDub?

VirtualDub is a GNU General Public License video editor. Basically, it’s an open source piece of software with plenty of free third-party filters available on the web. For our purposes, it’s also an excellent way to create time-lapse videos. While my recent post showed how to make a time-lapse video using software already installed on most PCs, it was a bit of a jury-rigged solution. VirtualDub is actually intended for time-lapse, among many other things. The program can be overwhelming in its simplicity so today’s tutorial will stick to the very basics of creating a time lapse-video.

Download VirtualDub The VirtualDub software can be found. After downloading, install the software onto your computer. Arranging Your Pictures Unlike Windows Movie Maker, VirtualDub requires the photos used for a time-lapse be in their own folder and numbered sequentially without gaps between number (i.e.

2,3,4 works but 1,3,5 doesn’t). The easiest way to do this is to select all files, right click, and choose “Rename.” It doesn’t matter what the beginning number is as long as the rest follow in order.

If you’re like me and take snapshots as well as time-lapse sequences on the same memory card, make sure you seperate them before proceeding. Once your photos are separated, go to “FileOpen video file” and select the first photo in the series.

Make sure “Automatically load linked segments” is checked at the bottom of the import window. You should now see a large, distorted image of your first photo. Right click and choose 25% viewing size and then resize the window next to it. The photos might still look distorted because the resizing filter hasn’t yet been applied.

The left window is the input file and the right is the output file. Frame Rate The first adjustment we’ll make is to the frame rate. For Windows Movie Maker, we used a 16fps frame rate because we had to use a trick in order to get a working time-lapse. While 16fps is usually fast enough to create persistence of motion, 24fps is the movie standard as well as the television standard in North America. Europe uses just under 30fps 24fps works better, which is why it’s the movie standard. The American NTSC frame rate is 30fps while European PAL is 25fps (Thanks to Dominic for the correction). In VirtualDub, go to “VideoFrame rate” and select “Change frame rate to (fps):” Change the frame rate to 24 and click “Ok.” This might be too fast or too slow for you, so play around until you find a rate that works.

Resizing The photos you imported are probably bigger than the final video you want, so we’ll have to resize the output. Go to “VideoFilters” and click “Add.” Find the “resize” filter and click “Ok.” Because you’ve already imported your photos, the filter knows the image dimension and aspect ratio. At the top of the window, select “Absolute (pixels).” The pixel size of a modern HDTV is 1920×1080. This size is called 1080i or 1080p depending on whether the image is interlaced or progressive scan, but that doesn’t matter at this stage. What matters is the maximum resolution of a TV screen is 1920×1080 so your video won’t gain anything by being larger than this. Change the second number of absolute pixels to 1080.

If you shoot in 16:9 ratio, the first number should now read 1920. If you shoot in the photographic standard 4:3 ratio, the first number should read 1440. Click “Ok” to close the filter details and then click “Ok” again to close the filter list. Compression We’re going to save the final video as an avi. File, so we’ll need to use compression to prevent the video from becoming unwieldy. Go to “VideoCompression” Here you’ll see a list of codecs.

You might have different codecs installed on your system than mine but many people will have the Divx or Xvid codec. I use the Xvid codec; not for any particular reason. Preview Now all the basic settings have been adjusted, you can either render your video or watch a preview. At the bottom of the screen is a series of small buttons. The first is a stop button, followed by a play button with a little “I,” and a play button with a little “O.” These are the input and output play buttons. Click on the output play button and your video should start rendering in the output window. Saving Your File To save, simply select “FileSave as AVI” and VirtualDub will do the rest.

You can upload this file type directly to websites such as youtube or edit it further in another program. As I said at the beginning of this post, this is just a basic tutorial meant to get you started without any unnecessary complications. I’ll go into more detail in future posts. If you liked this tutorial, check out another or click one of the boxes on the slider to the left to share this post. Related posts. Great tutorial.

It worked like a charm. I used it for my first time lapse and it worked as you described. I need to do some more tweaking with the exposure, white balance and such, but overall it was a cool experience. The only thing I would add is that when you go to select thye codec to use, I used the Microsoft Video 1 codec and it works perfectly. Not sure what the other choices are but I didn’t try any of those.

Anyway, I can’t wait to do my next time lapse. You should do some VirtualDub tutorials maybe on advanced features. WRONG!: “24fps is the movie standard as well as the television standard in North America. Europe uses just under 30fps.” PAL vs. NTSC In most cases, NTSC is used with a fps of 60i or 30p, so theoretically offers very slightly smoother motion than PAL, which is generally used with 50i or 25p.

The difference is negligible, however, and artefacts caused by frame rate conversion required when video has been recorded at the wrong rate for the display are more severe. NTSC receivers have a tint control to perform colour correction manually. If this is not adjusted correctly, the colours may be faulty.

The PAL standard automatically cancels hue errors by phase reversal, so a tint control is unnecessary. Chrominance phase errors in the PAL system are cancelled out using a 1H delay line resulting in lower saturation, which is much less noticeable to the eye than NTSC hue errors. However, the alternation of colour information — Hanover bars — can lead to picture grain on pictures with extreme phase errors even in PAL systems, if decoder circuits are misaligned or use the simplified decoders of early designs (typically to overcome royalty restrictions). In most cases such extreme phase shifts do not occur. This effect will usually be observed when the transmission path is poor, typically in built up areas or where the terrain is unfavourable.

The effect is more noticeable on UHF than VHF signals as VHF signals tend to be more robust. In the early 1970s some Japanese set manufacturers developed decoding systems to avoid paying royalties to Telefunken. The Telefunken license covered any decoding method that relied on the alternating subcarrier phase to reduce phase errors. This included very basic PAL decoders that relied on the human eye to average out the odd/even line phase errors. One solution was to use a 1H delay line to allow decoding of only the odd or even lines.

For example, the chrominance on odd lines would be switched directly through to the decoder and also be stored in the delay line. Then, on even lines, the stored odd line would be decoded again.

Video Frame Rate Conversion

This method effectively converted PAL to NTSC. Such systems suffered hue errors and other problems inherent in NTSC and required the addition of a manual hue control.

PAL and NTSC have slightly divergent colour spaces, but the colour decoder differences here are ignored.

AviSynth MSU Frame Rate Conversion Filter Project, idea: Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin Algorithm: Karen Simonyan, Sergey Grishin Implementation: Karen Simonyan MSU FRC 0.5: The first public release The filter is intended for video frame rate up-conversion. It increases the frame rate integer times. It allows, for example, to convert a video with 15 fps into a video with 30 fps.

Usage To use the plugin, copy MSUFRC.dll file to 'plugins' directory in AviSynth install folder or use the function LoadPlugin directly from the script. AviSynth script example: AviSource('video.avi') ConvertToYV12.MSUFRC(4, 'slow') The input video must be in YV12 colorspace. To convert a video into YV12 colorspace use ConvertToYV12. The width and the height of the input video must be multiples of 16. To resize a video use Crop and/or AddBorders. Parameters # Description Allowed values 1 Interpolation factor Any positive number 2 Preset fast - higher speed, lower quality medium - medium speed, medium quality slow - lower speed, better quality slow preset is used by default AviSynth webpage Examples Test sequence 'matrix'. Interpolation factor is 4, slow preset.

Fragment of the 'matrix' sequence (2 frames) After processing the fragment on the left by the FRC filter the frame rate increased 4 times Objective comparison with other algorithms The figure below demonstrates the results of the objective comparison. The objective quality of processed sequences for various methods was measured using Y-PSNR.

During PSNR calculation only interpolated frames were used. In order to do so the original video sequences were first decimated with factor 2 and then decimated frames were interpolated using FRC.

After that the interpolated frames were compared with the original ones using Y-PSNR metric. Vertical axis is marked by average Y-PSNR values for each sequence, the horizontal one - by the names of test video sequences. It can be seen that the developed algorithm shows the best objective quality on most sequences. FRC Y-PSNR comparison Download The filter was tested on AviSynth v2.57.