The Effects of the Microsoft LifeCam Cinema

Express yourself during video chats with the LifeCam Cinema's special effects.

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Microsoft offers a line of professional-grade webcams, called LifeCams, for home and business PC users. One model, the Cinema, is made of aluminum and captures video in high-definition 720p. The Cinema features a Windows Live Call button, providing one-touch access to the LifeCam Dashboard, a software program that controls the camera settings and provides more than 30 special effects to enhance video recordings, ranging from basic optical edits to 3-D animations.

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The LifeCam Dashboard contains a host of effects traditionally found in various video editing software, such as filters that manipulate color and other visual properties. Inverting color produces an effect similar to that of film negatives, while other effects give your video a black-and-white or brownish sepia tone. Other basic effects give your video glowing edges, rounded corners, a blurred softness or a cartoon-like appearance.

Distortion Effects

The Dashboard provides many effects to warp certain parts of the subject's body or certain portions of the viewing environment. Some warp facial features, giving the subject a large mouth, a pointy head, large eyes or a tiny nose. Others manipulate the subject's head to make it look like an alien, a cone, a square or a large circle. You can swirl the screen to resemble a fun house mirror or focus heavily on the center of the screen, producing a fish-eye effect.

3-D Animations

Some effects produce animated scenes and characters that enhance and interact with the foreground of the video during film capture. Clicking on one of these effects while recording video will cause visualizations to appear along the bottom or sides of the viewing screen. These effects include a beach scene, swimming fish, falling snow, flowers or leaves blowing in the wind, drifting clouds or ladybugs crawling across the screen.

3-D Accessories

The Dashboard includes other effects that simulate 3-D accessories. These effects use facial recognition technology, enabling them to track your movements and position within the frame and to recognize the contour of your facial features. Some effects simulate wearing sunglasses, a cowboy hat, a '70s afro, long blond hair, a butterfly mask or various animal faces. Other effects produce thought bubbles, a lightbulb or stars and question marks that encircle your head. These effects sometimes have trouble recognizing your face during quick movements or while turning to the side, so it's a good idea to sit still and face forward as much as possible during live video.

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Effects In VirtualDub

VirtualDub lets you add effects to your digital videos.

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VirtualDub is a software utility for capturing and processing video. In addition to creating video files, you can use it to compress and edit video and apply special effects. Effects filters for VirtualDub allow you to sharpen images, remove noise and improve color balance. Special effects include standard pincushion, noise and pixilation filters.

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VirtualDub was written by Avery Lee, who originally created the utility to compress anime videos. Lee made VirtualDub available as free software, allowing others to copy, reproduce and modify the software. This has made it possible for other users to write code that gives VirtualDub extra functionality, such as special effects and video-enhancing filters in addition to those that are part of the original utility. An exhaustive list of all the effects available for VirtualDub would run into several pages.

Correction

VirtualDub effects for improving videos and correcting problems include color correction, brightness control, sharpening and denoising filters. Denoising filters remove static and noise; sharpening filters define edges and make images clearer. Color correction improves problems with color balance and removes unwanted color tints (called stains). Brightness control effects correct for problems with videos that are too dark or too bright, and can help to reduce flickering. Other filters include effects to remove ghost images or shakiness. Examples include Color Balance and Xsharpen.

Resizing and Shaping

VirtualDub effects allow you to resize videos, making the image larger or smaller, or placing a border around the picture. Other effects let you change the shape of the picture. These can include subtle effects to make image fit the frame more precisely, or special effects that give the image a decorative shape or distort it. Examples are Canvas Size and Border Control.

Noise

You can add noise to a video, or remove it. This can be random noise, generated using an algorithm that changes random pixels in the image. You can also find effects that produce specific kinds of noise -- for example, the MSU Old Cinema filter creates the effect of an old motion picture, while Analog Noise imitates static on a badly-tuned TV. You can also add color stains, lines or ghost images with filters like MSU Noise Generator.

Fades and Motion Effects

Fade effects let you fade in or out between frames of the video, or fade two video streams together. Examples are Fader MMX and Exotic Fade. Effects such as Motion let you create the impression of panning, zooming or rotating. Perspective is a filter which allows you to artificially change the perspective of an image by stretching or skewing it.

Special Color Effects

Special color effects include Halftone, which converts a frame into two colors that you can select, and color-changing filters like Hue Cycle. Color filters can create psychedelic effects; examples include Luminescence Band, which changes the hues of each pixel in a frame based on their luminescence value.

ReferencesVirtualdub.org: What is VirtualDub?Infognition: VirtualDub Filters IndexInfognition: VirtualDub Video Effects FiltersResourcesUrchin: VirtualDub Effects FiltersPhoto Credit Agri Press/Lifesize/Getty ImagesRead Next:

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