The ultimate FREE video tool
 

I think most of you know it. It's a veteran tool called "Virtual Dub" and you can find it at www.virtualdub.org . With this impressive program, it's possible to do many many tricks for free and there are many filters you can use with it (for free too): remove logos, correct colour, bicubic resize,... and SMART DE-INTERLACING. Yes, you can do this without buying expensive programs.

Anyway, If you want the best de-interlacing option, you should use a program called Tmpgenc, but it only works when encoding to Mpeg. Take a look at www.tmpgenc.net

Good Luck!

Indeed Joan... those are awesome programs. If you combine this
with Avisynth and Premiere you can put footage to any program
without saving it to harddisk etc. You can do some awesome
things with all of this. Takes a while to learn and understand
though. That is the downside to such "raw" and free programs.

Hi Joan,

Hey thank you for the post! VirtualDub seems to be quite a nice program. I will spend some time with it soon.

One thing, I tried to open some .avi capture files I created with Vegas Video - it wouldn't recognize them, said it only recognized Video For Windows (VFW) codecs. Can you shed any light on this?

Looking forward to hearing from you,

- don

VirtualDub only recognizes VFW(Video for Windows) files...aka Type 2 avi's. VV3 will capture either Type 1 or type 2, depending on your preferences setting. Be sure to select "type 2 or you'll not be able to read them with VirtualDub.

Here's the Micro$oft skinny:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directshow_sp1/htm/type1vstype2dvfiles.asp

Bill... that should be the exact opposite... BUT, the actualy file
type does not have much (notice that I do not say nothing)
to do with VFW vs. Directshow.

Let me explain. AVI type 2 files will NEED a directshow application
to playback (which VirtualDub is NOT) if I'm not mistaken. AVI
type 1 files can be read by any application.

There is however another problem with DV. The standard
included DV codec from Microsoft is a directshow codec ONLY.
So it does not matter which AVI type it is, it will not play on
VFW applications.

Two ways out of this problem.

1. Install an extra DV codec that also has a VFW interface
like Mainconcepts codec.
2. Use something like Avisynth (which can be found here:
http://www.videotools.net/uk/index.php) to wrap the
AVI. You write a little script that loads up the Directshow
AVi and presents it so that Virtualdub can use it.

There might also be some other way, but these are the only
ones I know off.

sorry, rob, might have gotten it a**-backwards. I NEVER use type 1's...old technology that tend to lose sound sync. Stick w/ type 2's and you can't go wrong. Regardless, there's a few converters around...type1 to type 2....Ulead's MSP 6 has one.