ragingFX

Taking videos became a good hobby of mine since my days in college up to now. But owning a low grade video camera is really a pain in the ass. Getting the raw footage from miniDV to digital is quite a pain sometimes. It may seem easy using Adobe Premiere's 'capture', but taking a look on the raw video felt really daunting. Everything in the video really needs cleaning up! A process like deinterlacing and noise reduction needs to be taken seriously. Ofcourse, Premiere can handle these, but its noise reduction keeps me out of it. That's why I chose Avidemux for this job. Since then I've been looking for a very good video encoder. One that can convert video to other format or use other codecs. At that time, Avidemux was the only one that shone light on me. Of course, it's open source and available on all distributions. The content in there wiki were also useful, sometimes you really need to go to the forums to get a hang on some of its features. This post maybe a cloud of thought to people new to video encoding. You can grab Lynda's QuickTime Compression Principles to have some good background on codecs. Okey, enough with the long talk. Here's a snapshot from the raw and the processed one using Avidemux. The person in the image is Art Esmeralda, Executive Director of DabaweGNU, sharing his knowledge about farming at the last Ideacamp Davao. You can also take a look at our video channel. The raw/uncompressed was captured in Premiere (from miniDV through a firewire) then saved as an uncompressed AVI. The file size has gone upto 12GB per tape. This is the cause of an uncompressed video, file size gets bigger and the quality of course will not be compromised. In Avidemux, I used the filters that is shown in the right image. And it gave me the none noise output. The result was really impressive, I didn't expect that this app really can do better than the others. I'm not saying that only Avidemux can achieve this quality. If I can remember, I also had used Quicktime back then, which is a very good app! There are a lot of other video encoders out there. It's our take to choose what fits us right. So what's your video healer of choice, care to share?