Video capturing is an inexact science, and you may find unwanted artifacts or other problemswith the video image once you have it on your hard drive. At the very least, the video probablydoesn t start or end exactly where you want. You may see black bars along the edges. Or the videoseems too dark or too bright. Now is the time to optimize the video. (Note that the audiooptimizations above apply to audio tracks in video as well.)

Unfortunately, video files are not as plastic as audio files. This is why correct capturingtechnique is so important. Video has fewer fixes available to it than audio. But there are a fewthings you can do.

First, let s quickly review some good video capture settings from Chapter 2:

• Frame size: 320 240

• Frame rate: 30 fps (frames per second)

• Compression ratio: Lowest available

Once you get some experience, you might play with these settings a bit. You might trycapturing at a larger frame size, say 640 480. (Remember touse a 4:3 ratio!) This is useful if you plan to stream at very high bit rates. But the bigger framedoubles your file size more or less. And you should attempt to capture uncompressed video. Thismeans you ll have all the video information you could possibly need. But the file size will beenormous, and you will quickly eat up disk storage space. Furthermore, capturing at a large framesize requires a more powerful computer, or else you could lose video frames. Try...