ErMaC
21st August 2002, 13:10
Hi, I'm not a big poster on this forum but I like to read it a lot because there's an awful lot of very good stuff going on here (like Don's new msmoother filter, just brilliant!)
I'm posting because I'd like to ask you guys about possibly trying to resurrect the AVISynth Adobe Premiere import plugin.
A lot of you may not know but there is a very large community of Anime Music Video creators online at AnimeMusicVideos.org (http://www.animemusicvideos.org). A very good portion of us use Adobe Premiere for our editing, and a over a year ago I began writing a video guide (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/legacy/ErMaC/default.htm) there to help introduce newbies or just those not-in-the-know about the technical aspects of digital video and how it would concern the average AMV creator. One of the guides - and the most popular - is a guide on how to read DVD files straight into Premiere for editing with.
The original method involved concatenating all the VOBs into one DVD2AVI project file and then using VFAPI to open that file in Premiere (since it turned out you could only ever open 1 VFAPI file simultaneously without confusing the VFAPI VFW codec). Later when MPEG2DEC.DLL was first released, the guide was changed to utilize AVISynth because you could open more than one AVS file at once using that method, and it was also faster (although it lead to memory leak problems which have now been fixed in v2.04 - thanks guys!).
Anyways, a constant bottleneck for us has been the old and under-updated Premiere import plugin. It hasn't been updated in over two years, and it contains some major bugs:
1) Video can't be resized. In Premiere our monitor windows have to be the full 720x480 or else the video stream appears blank. Same problem shows up in the timeline thumbnails, too. This posed an even bigger problem when Premiere 6 came out because by default it sets the pixel aspect ratio of 720x480 clips to .9 and resizes them to 648x480 in the Monitor window, immediately rendering them unwatchable. Instead we have to manually switch the aspect ratio of each clip back to square pixels.
However it doesn't happen all the time. For instance the monitor window always has this problem but the preview window in the Transparency options does not have the problem.
2) It contains a bug with solid colors or high gamma. In scenes with a pure, solid colors that involve a 100% value of any of the three chroma channels the colors change to a bizarre neon shade of something else (solid greens turn into neon orange, solid blue turns neon green, etc). This unfortunately can come up a lot in Anime as there can be blocks of a solid color - especially in the more recent all-digital shows that never touch film. We've come up with a workaround that involves adding this line:
Levels(0,1,255,20,255)
However it slows down the processing and would be only necessary for a few scenes usually. (an alternative method is opening the D2V file in TMPGEnc and using the source range to dump out that one particular scene to huffyuv AVI)
I've attached a screenshot illustrating the problem.
3) It is slow in general. I do not know if it could be made any faster, but when Premiere projects can encompass 26 different half-hour AVS files speed becomes a big concern.
I'm writing this because I'd like to ask if any of you would be willing to update the Premiere plugin to actually be a worthy part of AVISynth and its associated programs.
I am indeed aware of Link2 - however it is not a free solution and from my tests and others we have found issues with it not working with seeking and other issues (we've seen various channels separate and turn into upsidedown squished bars) that make it an unreasonable alternative - even if it were free.
Therefore we are stuck using the Premiere import plugin. I'd just like you to know there is a community of over three thousand creators, many of which would very much appreciate your help on this matter. The vast majority of us are not coders and are unable to do this on our own (I'm an editor and a video technical person, but not a programmer).
And please don't feel like you'd be helping a bunch of pirates - while I'm sure there are people there who have not paid for Premiere, a very good chunk of people there have paid good money for the program (I own both v5.1 and v6.0 legally) and the site itself on the forums and the guides discourage piracy and actively (for lack of a better word) flame those who do pirate it.
Therefore on behalf of many of the editors over at amv.org I've come to ask for your help. I do not know how difficult it would be to update or start from scratch on such a plugin, but please know if there's anything we could do to help, I'm sure there would be dozens of people ready there to help out. I doubt you'd have much trouble finding beta testers.
Even just fixing one or both of the major bugs by looking at the source would be very much appreciated. I don't expect people to spend huge amounts of time on this since I doubt many of you are big Premiere users, but we would all appreciate it very much.
Thank you all for your hard word and I hope to hear from you,
-Justin "ErMaC" Emerson (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_myprofile.php?user_id=535)
ErMaC Studios (http://www.ermacstudios.org)
edit: the screenshot is quite large so I wouldn't recommend the mods make it visible on the page, rather a link to it or something.
I'm posting because I'd like to ask you guys about possibly trying to resurrect the AVISynth Adobe Premiere import plugin.
A lot of you may not know but there is a very large community of Anime Music Video creators online at AnimeMusicVideos.org (http://www.animemusicvideos.org). A very good portion of us use Adobe Premiere for our editing, and a over a year ago I began writing a video guide (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/legacy/ErMaC/default.htm) there to help introduce newbies or just those not-in-the-know about the technical aspects of digital video and how it would concern the average AMV creator. One of the guides - and the most popular - is a guide on how to read DVD files straight into Premiere for editing with.
The original method involved concatenating all the VOBs into one DVD2AVI project file and then using VFAPI to open that file in Premiere (since it turned out you could only ever open 1 VFAPI file simultaneously without confusing the VFAPI VFW codec). Later when MPEG2DEC.DLL was first released, the guide was changed to utilize AVISynth because you could open more than one AVS file at once using that method, and it was also faster (although it lead to memory leak problems which have now been fixed in v2.04 - thanks guys!).
Anyways, a constant bottleneck for us has been the old and under-updated Premiere import plugin. It hasn't been updated in over two years, and it contains some major bugs:
1) Video can't be resized. In Premiere our monitor windows have to be the full 720x480 or else the video stream appears blank. Same problem shows up in the timeline thumbnails, too. This posed an even bigger problem when Premiere 6 came out because by default it sets the pixel aspect ratio of 720x480 clips to .9 and resizes them to 648x480 in the Monitor window, immediately rendering them unwatchable. Instead we have to manually switch the aspect ratio of each clip back to square pixels.
However it doesn't happen all the time. For instance the monitor window always has this problem but the preview window in the Transparency options does not have the problem.
2) It contains a bug with solid colors or high gamma. In scenes with a pure, solid colors that involve a 100% value of any of the three chroma channels the colors change to a bizarre neon shade of something else (solid greens turn into neon orange, solid blue turns neon green, etc). This unfortunately can come up a lot in Anime as there can be blocks of a solid color - especially in the more recent all-digital shows that never touch film. We've come up with a workaround that involves adding this line:
Levels(0,1,255,20,255)
However it slows down the processing and would be only necessary for a few scenes usually. (an alternative method is opening the D2V file in TMPGEnc and using the source range to dump out that one particular scene to huffyuv AVI)
I've attached a screenshot illustrating the problem.
3) It is slow in general. I do not know if it could be made any faster, but when Premiere projects can encompass 26 different half-hour AVS files speed becomes a big concern.
I'm writing this because I'd like to ask if any of you would be willing to update the Premiere plugin to actually be a worthy part of AVISynth and its associated programs.
I am indeed aware of Link2 - however it is not a free solution and from my tests and others we have found issues with it not working with seeking and other issues (we've seen various channels separate and turn into upsidedown squished bars) that make it an unreasonable alternative - even if it were free.
Therefore we are stuck using the Premiere import plugin. I'd just like you to know there is a community of over three thousand creators, many of which would very much appreciate your help on this matter. The vast majority of us are not coders and are unable to do this on our own (I'm an editor and a video technical person, but not a programmer).
And please don't feel like you'd be helping a bunch of pirates - while I'm sure there are people there who have not paid for Premiere, a very good chunk of people there have paid good money for the program (I own both v5.1 and v6.0 legally) and the site itself on the forums and the guides discourage piracy and actively (for lack of a better word) flame those who do pirate it.
Therefore on behalf of many of the editors over at amv.org I've come to ask for your help. I do not know how difficult it would be to update or start from scratch on such a plugin, but please know if there's anything we could do to help, I'm sure there would be dozens of people ready there to help out. I doubt you'd have much trouble finding beta testers.
Even just fixing one or both of the major bugs by looking at the source would be very much appreciated. I don't expect people to spend huge amounts of time on this since I doubt many of you are big Premiere users, but we would all appreciate it very much.
Thank you all for your hard word and I hope to hear from you,
-Justin "ErMaC" Emerson (http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_myprofile.php?user_id=535)
ErMaC Studios (http://www.ermacstudios.org)
edit: the screenshot is quite large so I wouldn't recommend the mods make it visible on the page, rather a link to it or something.