How To Determine What Plugins Are Needed In A Script.

[Deano123]

For A AviSynth Script How Do I Determine What Plugins I Need In The Script.

I See People Giving Me Script Examples, And It Has About 4 Plugins Directorys, But How Do They Know What Plugins To Put In The Script.

Need Some Help On This, Thanks

[stickboy]

Unfortunately, the most straightforward way is probably to try loading the script, and if it complains about not being able to find some function, then search for a plugin that provides that function.

Or ask the people who give you those script examples what plugins they're depending on.

[Deano123]

Unfortunately, the most straightforward way is probably to try loading the script, and if it complains about not being able to find some function, then search for a plugin that provides that function.

Or ask the people who give you those script examples what plugins they're depending on.
I Want To Like:

How Do I Know When To Use Plugins Like ''Removegrain.dll -Masktools.dll.....'' This Is What I Want To Know.

How Do I Know When To Use Certain Plugins.

[foxyshadis]

http://www.avisynth.org/mediawiki/wiki will help a lot (especially the beginner areas), as well as the documentation, which breaks them down into categories. Especially useful is the external plugins page. Reading the forum and seaching for specific problems. Generally, familizing yourself with different plugins and their effects is the way to go.

ps, stuff like this belongs in avisynth usage, and Only The First Letter In A Sentence Is Capitalized.

[Deano123]

LOL, I Know When Ever A Type I Capitalize My First Letter, Im Used To It Now. And Thanks For Link Even Though I Have Vistit Before

[Pookie]

There's a handful of them to load and keep updated on your system -

DGdecode
Masktools
MT_Masktools
MVtools
RemoveGrain

The above plugins are used extensively in many of the functions you see posted on Doom9. By no means does that list cover ALL of them.

Many functions also access the following:

Tdeint
TIVTC
EEDI2
DGBob
Decomb
LeakKernelDeint
FFT3dfilter
Undot
Deen
Warpsharp (the Japanese one)
ColorMatrix
DegrainMedian

Dust (AviSynth 2.0 plugin, still loved by many)

[jordonkay]

I too would really appreciate some help in the avisynth filters/plugins area, and my punctuation is excellent. I'm looking for a little more advanced information then the original poster seemed to be, but hey, why start a new thread just for me.

I back up all my dvd's to mpeg4 as a matter of course, and I think I'm pretty well versed on basic avisynth usage. I generally end up using pretty much the same script (mpeg2source, colormatrix, IVTC where needed, lanczosresize, undot) and get fairly decent results , I guess to 2-3 CD sized xvid/x264 encodes. What goes in pretty much comes out.

I have yet to really experiment with actually attempting to clean up or 'improve' the videos I work with using the wide range of filters which everybody seems to be using, mostly becuase I can't find any documentation which lies between the most basic avisynth usage ("Your first script") and advanced ("A System for Fast Erosion and Dilation of Bi-Level Images") discussions.

What I am trying to learn is things like:

1. When are the usage of intermediate filters generally indicated? I don't mean 'specific' filters, per the forum rules. I mean 'classes' of filters. What are the basic, common visual things to look for which would suggest the use, for example, of a sharpen filter, or a denoise filter, or a fluxconvulution filter, etc. I need some basic references to begin training my eye to spotting problems with video. I can understand the ideas behind the most blatently obvious ones, but almost all the filters being discussed around here are more subtle than that, or used in combination for noticable effect.

2. How often do you guys (and gals) use filters, and do you have a regular set you use or do you independently analyse each video and change often? Are you approaching filtering as a 'problem solving only' effort, or do you routinely apply these lossy filters suit your preferences (like a sharper feel or increased contrast) to otherwise 'problem free' video?

3. Do modern DVD's generally need much filtering? As a beginner and as a backup-maker, I'm concerned to randomly apply lossy filters which seem to look good only to look a year later and wish I never....

4. One specific question - Am I wasting my time using cpu=6 on mpeg2source files? I always do, but most references seem not to. I back up DVD's right out of the package before even watching, so it's tough to look through the whole movie for macroblocking (which I can recognize, obviously), and deringing (which I still can't fing a visual example of).

Anyways, thanks. I really do respect the reasoning behind Doom9 forum rules about asking 'which is the best to use'....What I'm looking for is some resources, examples, favorite tricks, whatever to help me understand and use the technical tools available to me in the interest of making my own ultimately personal decisions. Trying to do so without any basic guidelines at all, however, is just unexpressive and time-consuming.

As a musician and a graphic designer, I am now able to decide for myself 'the best way' to write a song or create a page layout. But before I knew what an interval was or what negative space meant, I was mostly unable to express my creative intentions. I feel the same way now..I get the sense I could be making way better looking backups, but not sure how. I've been searching for weeks on this great forum and elsewhere, and I just can't find anything equivalent to 'music theory 101' for video filtering.

I'd love to hear what people's favorite or most usual filter combinations are and why they use them, not so I can copy their preferences but just so I can figure out what my own preferences are. I've read all the threads, the avisynth wiki, Donald Graft's site (what I could understand)...Help?

Thanks! Long post, I'm blushing now.

[lamer_de]

1. When are the usage of intermediate filters generally indicated? I don't mean 'specific' filters, per the forum rules. I mean 'classes' of filters. What are the basic, common visual things to look for which would suggest the use, for example, of a sharpen filter, or a denoise filter, or a fluxconvulution filter, etc. I need some basic references to begin training my eye to spotting problems with video. I can understand the ideas behind the most blatently obvious ones, but almost all the filters being discussed around here are more subtle than that, or used in combination for noticable effect.

Well, I guess it depends on your personal aim and on your source. Usually, the first thing you do is to deal with IVTC or deinterlace, so that you have a clean, progressive source at hand. Then you apply some filters for noise removal e.g. a spatial/temporal/3D filter, depending on the strength of artifacts you have. There are filters that have only subtle effects and can often be applied to all sources without changing the looks much (removegrain with mode 1 or 2, undot etc). Often, you apply a sharpening filter afterwards to either compensate for the blurryness the denoising filter introduced or to create a sharper/punchier/livelier image.

It mostly depends on your source, really. If you have a look at most of the threads here, you'll see that they evolve around non-dvd sources. 25 year old VHS tapes, dv tapes the dog chewed on or TV caps from a romanian station received with a clothes hanger as antenna. In general, sources that need huge improvement.
The DVD threads I remember mainly deal with standard conversions (PAL DVDs from NTSC masters recorded in SECAM), old movies that the studio was too lazy to fix or asian bootlegs. If you have your DVD of a brand-new hollywood flick you usually don't need all the filters discussed.

Also, the backup strategy varies from person to person. Some want a "transparent" backup that is indistungishable from the DVD, some take pride in squeezing 30mins of content in 30MB and others just want the movie squeezed down to a CD. If you don't watch the DVDs beforehand, it's probably best to just use filters that don't have a great effect on the picture (but in contrast don't help that much with compression either), so that you don't end up with a overfiltered blocksoup when you picked a DVD that is different from your others.
About the cpu=6: It would for my taste probably even too much filtering as a standard filter, but I'm more the "transparent quality" guy. If you think it offers better quality over let's say 2 or 4, then there's nothing against using it.
Sorry for all the rather general and vague answers, but not without a reason one of the most used phrases on this board is "post an unprocessed sample clip of your source" (the "do not ask whats best" rule hits the same spot imho). If you want specific answers, it's probably best to name a concrete example.

CU,
lamer_de

[unskinnyboy]

@lamer_de, :goodpost:

@jordonkay, To supplement whatever lamer_de said, it is very important here to know what kind of sources you are dealing with. Just the regular brand-new Hollywood DVDs or messed-up as hell VHS captures? If it is the former, breaking through their tenacious copy protections may seem like a more difficult task than doing a good 2-CD/3-CD XviD/x264 rip. It's that easy (most of the times). Either a 1:1 rip or if you feel adventurous, some mild denoising+sharpening and you are done. Filtering is optional here.

If you are dealing with messed up videos all the time, then it is a different ball-game altogether. Filtering becomes a necessity. You will need to know a lot more stuff - knowledge of the problem in the first place (e.g: you need to know that the wobbly dots around those contrasting images in your video is called "dotcrawl"), why the problem was caused so that next time you can try and avoid it to start with (bad capture? bad reception? cheap co-axial cables? remember, prevention is better than cure), the variety of filters available for a particular problem (which mofo can I use to fix this?), the effectiveness of those filters (will the problem be completely fixed? will it cause other side-effects? like what if you fix the dots, but now the picture looks like it was white-washed?) etc. So you see, it's not an easy thing and it comes with experience. Don't go by some of the people here, some of them do encoding for a living from messed-up sources on a daily basis. Imagine you having to put out your best encode to earn your bread, that should be enough motivation for someone to sit and amass knowledge, however painstaking the process might be! Unless you have a lot of time to spend on fixing hypothetical issues on hypthetical sources, I would suggest a "take it as it comes" approach to filtering.

[Prettz]

There's a handful of them to load and keep updated on your system -

DGdecode
Masktools
MT_Masktools
MVtools
RemoveGrain

The above plugins are used extensively in many of the functions you see posted on Doom9. By no means does that list cover ALL of them.

Many functions also access the following:

Tdeint
TIVTC
EEDI2
DGBob
Decomb
LeakKernelDeint
FFT3dfilter
Undot
Deen
Warpsharp (the Japanese one)
ColorMatrix
DegrainMedian

Dust (AviSynth 2.0 plugin, still loved by many)
You're missing FluxSmooth and Unfilter :angry:

[jordonkay]

Thanks guys, as I read back I guess I'm asking a lot (meaning of life?) and you've been more than helpful.

And for the most part I am just archiving DVD's I buy, almost always recent mainstream DVD movies <15 years plus some Criterion DVD's (which always seems well mastered).

I suppose if I could ask one specific question (and I suppose this could belong in the mpeg4 category as well), I get a fair amount of softening when using the 45-90% presets with the eqm_vlr or sixofnine matrices. I usually go for 1/3 DVD-R size encodes, up to 3 CD when necessary. I just usually don't have the time for x264 @ 1.5 frames per second. My question (as it relates to avisynth plugins) is -> Would it be appropriate to use a sharpening filter first, and then use the recommended CQM in the xVid 'presets', or is that the wrong way, perhaps another CQM and don't filter? I don't mind if my videos become less compressable (to a point...) but I'm looking to regain some of the sharpness which usually comes with an x264 encode. Also, would Didee's See-Saw plugin an appropriate sharpening filter to use (I am looking for exactly that type of improvement)? I have a question about how to use it (...insert your favorite which?) too, but I'll post it in that thread.

You guys should charge by the hour. I've learned so much lurking around this site the last few months. Wish I could contribute somehow.

Thnx