February 2001 News Archive

 


February 2001

 

Wednesday, February 28, 2001

Just so everyone knows, I'm going to be on a break starting this weekend, so that's when I plan on updating the site.

 

Tuesday, February 20, 2001

Today I made some significant changes to the Low Resolution Video Processing section of my guide.  It now covers a much wider variety of video formats.  For example, I added information on processing a video for VCD format and integrated the steps for processing a PAL/SECAM video.  Because of this, I also modified the NTSC Vs. PAL/SECAM page to be more of an informational article, rather than a how-to page.  Finally, I made a number of minor updates to several other pages.

My next task will be to create the high resolution video processing section.  Now that I've updated the low resolution processing section, it should be much easier to create the high resolution section.  I'll try to write it up and put it online as soon as possible.  As usual, feel free to contact me with any concerns you have.

 

Saturday, February 10, 2001

I'm sorry I haven't made any updates recently.  I've been very busy with school and other things.  Rest assured that I am still working on the site, such as running tests on filters for processing high resolution video.  When I find the time to do some writing, I'll try update the site a bit.  In the mean time, you can contact me if you have any suggestions.

 

Sunday, February 4, 2001

Okay, I've finally finished the section about High Resolution Video Capture.  I also updated the section on Low Resolution Video Capture and added a useful Video Capture Overview.  In addition, I made a load of updates to other sections of the guide.  This includes information about horizontal resolution in the High Vs. Low Resolution Capture article, sample frame grabs of NTSC telecined video in Part 1 of my Telecining article, and a bunch of other minor updates.
Please note that while my guide now includes instructions on how to capture high resolution video, I have not yet added sections about processing or encoding high resolution video.  I will add this information in the (hopefully) near future.

 

Saturday, February 3, 2001

This is an important update for anyone who uses an MJPEG codec.  After doing some testing, I've found that there is a problem in all the popular MJPEG codecs when capturing in YUY2.  Basically, all the MJPEG codecs that I'm aware of (PICVideo, MainConcept, and Morgan Multimedia) deal with YUY2 data in a different way than VirtualDub and other video codecs, such as Huffyuv.  This leads to an image with washed out colors when capturing in YUY2.  I've been talking with Jim Bean at PICVideo, and he has confirmed the problem.  The people are PICVideo are currently working on an updated version of their codec to fix the problem.

In the meantime, you can work around the problem by capturing with MJPEG in RBG24 with 4/2/2 subsampling.  This will be similar to capturing in YUY2, although the file size will probably be slightly higher and the compression speed will probably be slower.  I'll update my guide to explain how to use this workaround when I upload the new material on high resolution capture.  (I plan on adding the high resolution capture stuff very soon, by the way.)