About the Authors

Georgios Diamantopoulos was born in February 1984. Born and raised in Corinth, Greece, his scientific inclination towards computers was evident in his teenage years and he pursued his dreams by moving to Birmingham, UK to study Computer Systems Engineering in 2001. Early on in his course he expressed further interest in video editing and compression. Georgios graduated in July 2004 with an Honors degree from the University of Birmingham, where he is currently researching in the field of video compression towards a PhD degree. He has been involved with various extracurricular activities such as writing documentation for various video-editing tasks and developing a video quality assessment utility called Video Quality Studio.

I would like to voice my sincere gratitude to my family and friends who have supported my choices and dreams from the start. Through the constant and honest feedback of David Barnes, my editor in Packt, this book has been better shaped to be reader-friendly and I have improved my writing style. Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to my knowledge of digital multimedia over the years—each contribution has been of great value.

John Buechler, a.k.a. PapaJohn, is the prominent specialist in the community of Movie Maker 2 users (the starter video editing software included in every version of Windows XP). He co-authored Movie Maker 2—Zero to Hero, and wrote Movie Maker 2—Do Amazing Things. Other writings include a tutorial in MaximumPC and weekly newsletters.

Movie Maker 2 is a basic starter application, and John encourages using other software that complements it. Virtual Dub has been a core item in his toolkit since the beginning. His books and other writings routinely include it.

PapaJohn has a very active online presence, with over 10,000 posts to newsgroups and forums in the past few years. His www.papajohn.org website is an authoritative online reference for Movie Maker users. He moderates forums at www.SimplyDV.com and www.windowsmoviemakers.net, and is a regular at the microsoft.windowsxp.moviemaker newsgroup.

He won the annual Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awards for three years straight: 2003 through 2005, and was further acknowledged by a special 2004 Windows ‘Winny’ award for outstanding community support by Microsoft.

Thanks to Avery Lee for developing and sharing such great software, Christian and the community of VirtualDub users who support and expand it, and David Barnes of Packt Publishing for selecting me to write the introductory chapter. I appreciate being involved in efforts that help everyone learn more about today’s wonderful digital video editing tools.

Sohail Salehi was born in Mashad, Iran on March 17, 1975. He graduated in Software Engineering from Mashad University in 2000. In recent years, Sohail has contributed to over 20 books, mainly in programming and computer graphics. He has written frequent articles for 0 & 1 Magazine—an IT magazine from Ferdowsi University. You can find a complete list of his works at http://www.sohail2d.com.

In the past he has worked as the Chairman in the IT department of various universities including Mashad, Ferdowsi, and the Industrial Management University.

Currently he is working on IT training standards for the Iranian "Work and Science Organization".

I’d like to thank my lovely wife Ghazal, who supported and accompanied me in every single step during the writing of this book.

And I’d like to thank David Barnes, whose guidance helped me to improve my writing.

And finally I’d like to thank all of my forum’s active members and moderators who filled my absence on the board while I was working on this book.