Why do some video editors consider AVISynth to be outdated?

[GAP]

Why do some video editors consider AVISynth to be outdated? AVISynth does have its uses, especially among the video restoration community. I had no idea that this was a thing until last year when I was searching for scripts. I cannot remember the exact post but it mentioned how AVISynth is outdated. Does anyone here consider it to be "outdated"? Or did that statement come from a place of ignorance?

[VoodooFX]

Or did that statement come from a place of ignorance?

Yes, this one.

[johnmeyer]

I still use the DOS-based version of dBase III for my contact manager. Is it outdated? Of course. Does it still work? Yup, just like it did when I first used dBase II back in 1982. Are there better programs? Of course.

But here is the key thing: it would take time and effort to install a new program and configure it to have as good a front-end as the one I added to dBase III all those years ago.

With AVISynth, the only reason to upgrade to the offshoots is if they could do things that AVISynth cannot. This depends on what you are trying to do. For me, the answer is, "not yet," but to be fair, there are some pretty interesting things that I have only seen done on Vapoursynth. Python isn't that big a chore to learn (I've had to edit a few programs written by others), but I haven't yet had a reason to invest that learning work.

[SaurusX]

AVISynth still is the best tool in more than a few cases.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6944-cleaning-up-spike-lees-mixed-format-masterpiece

Then, at literally the last minute—5:30 p.m. on the Friday we were supposed to ship a file for disc authoring—Andrew showed me a video. It was the first thirty minutes of Bamboozled, processed with an obscure command-line software he had just gotten to work.

Jaggies were minimal. There were no inexplicable artifacts. The newly preserved resolution lent the image a brand-new clarity.

I wonder what that command line software was...

[poisondeathray]

Literally, Avisynth IS "outdated"... it was last updated in 2016. :D

Avisynth+ is the version actively developed with commits as recent as last week. AVS+ features many improvements, bug fixes

[StainlessS]

Why do some video editors consider AVISynth to be outdated?
Give names and addresses, we'll send the boys round.

[FranceBB]

Let me tell you two interesting tales.

Tale 1 - Davinci Resolve

I met some editors that were using Davinci Resolve and thought they could do everything there.
They received some XDCAM-50 25i TFF files that they had to bob-deinterlace, upscale to UHD and convert to BT2020 HLG as they were "old" Tennis footages from ATP Master 1000 recorded several years ago that needed to end up in a documentary.
Of course they imported them into Davinci, set the deinterlacing to "Davinci Neural Engine Deinterlace" and let it do its thing, then they upscaled it to UHD and applied a LUT on top of it.
Needless to say, that feed was recorded with some issues in the source signal coming from the satellite as it didn't go through a DFS to stabilize the signal but rather was straight from the Sat into the mixing room and then AVID Airspeed Capture.
The Davinci Neural Engine Deinterlace made one big mess of it, especially in the points where it had orphan fields.
They were almost throwing away the footage when I manually ran QTGMC() and NNEDI3() to bob and upscale and Cube() to go to BT2020 HLG with the BBC LUT.
Needless to say the result was astonishingly good compared to what Davinci produced and this way they were able to use those footages in the documentary.
Once again, Avisynth saved the day.

Tale 2 - AVID Media Composer

Most editors are nice, however I also met some entitled editors saying that for the new UHD platform they wouldn't have been going through the encoding department 'cause they didn't think it was necessary.
Boy, what a mistake that was for them.
The year was 2021, summer 2021, to be precise, when the UK declared "freedom day" and everyone was able to go out and about after COVID.
We signed an agreement with a third party whose name I can't disclose to use their footages in some of our programs.
Our UHD programs are all BT2020 HLG and the third party footages were parts of movies in BT2020 PQ, however they would only really accept a conversion using the LUTs they provided, one per every nit, so that the MaxCLL was gonna be remapped to 1000 nits in HLG and the right one was supposed to be used according to the MaxCLL specified.
But... here's the thing: those LUTs were able to work only in Studio RGB 16bit, in other words, in Narrow Range (Limited TV Range) RGB and when you try to apply them in AVID, there's no way to specify it as AVID Media Composer always assumes that when you apply a LUT you apply it in Full Range RGB, therefore the result was completely wrong.
Once again, Avisynth saved the show as it was more than capable of doing it with Cube() and z_ConvertFormat().
Not only that, it was possible to automatise the whole thing using the provided XML:

https://i.imgur.com/NulEOy6.png



Nowadays Avisynth is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the encodes at the company I work for, both manual (for documentaries I worked on) and automatic (incoming ingest and outgest with various kind of frame rate conversion, resizing, re-encoding etc) with around 185 workflows.

https://i.imgur.com/78vRzKt.png

These are the stats from last year, 2023:


https://i.imgur.com/MLXPLKt.png


Very well alive and kicking 'cause 207 thousand files encoded in a year are no joke ehehehehehe
And anyone who says it's not fit for the job anymore, just speaks out of plain ignorance and superficiality.
Avisynth was, is and forever will be the best frameserver in the world.

[ChaosKing]

I don't think it's an understatement to say that pinterf single-handedly saved avisynth from being outdated.

[coolgit]

Anything that involves in typing out command lines are considered to be outdated. Most people prefer to click on buttons, icons, etc.

[SaurusX]

I don't think it's an understatement to say that pinterf single-handedly saved avisynth from being outdated.

This is very true.

[johnmeyer]

Literally, Avisynth IS "outdated"... it was last updated in 2016. :D

Avisynth+ is the version actively developed with commits as recent as last week. AVS+ features many improvements, bug fixesGood point.

I use AVISynth+ but I guess that seemed to me to be the same thing as AVISynth because I can still use most of my plugins.

[StainlessS]

I don't think it's an understatement to say that pinterf single-handedly saved avisynth from being outdated.

Yip, big kiss to the big P, https://www.cosgan.de/images/smilie/liebe/a005.gif
(now bend over :) [Sorry, full of beer])

[poisondeathray]

Give names and addresses, we'll send the boys round.

Time to call in the D9 AVS ENFORCER!!!!!

https://i.postimg.cc/d0Xshrt8/ss-d9-avs-enforcer.webp (https://postimages.org/)


I don't think it's an understatement to say that pinterf single-handedly saved avisynth from being outdated.

I remember a of several lean years <crickets....>

Thanks pinterf , to all the contributors, plugin and script developers.

Keep the dream alive!

[lollo2]

Yes, thanks to all the contributors, plugin and script developers.

Long live AviSynth!!!

[Boulder]

I think the answer to the original question is: "Because the newer it is, the gooder it is" :p

People think most of the time that if it's new, it must be fancy and be better than anything before it. I recently tried to adapt myself to the new MS Outlook (been marked as "new" for a year or something now?) at work for three days and had to give up because it is so bad both UI- and functionality-wise compared to the current stable one.

[Losko]

Let me tell you two interesting tales.
[...]


Avisynth+ in action in a real production environment, very interesting!

Out of curiosity, FranceBB, how do you manage new Avisynth+ versions, when the guys release a new one?
I mean, I assume in a work environment you would not touch anything that's currently working, but are you keen to upgrade your avisynth version(s)? and if you are, do you make it go through a complete test session before deploying?

[FranceBB]

Avisynth+ in action in a real production environment, very interesting!

Out of curiosity, FranceBB, how do you manage new Avisynth+ versions, when the guys release a new one?
I mean, I assume in a work environment you would not touch anything that's currently working, but are you keen to upgrade your avisynth version(s)? and if you are, do you make it go through a complete test session before deploying?

We have three environments: dev, non prod and prod.
My personal workstation is where I experiment most of the time and I'm always on the very latest build released by Ferenc.
Same goes for the various indexers, filters etc in terms of plugins.
I do a lot of tests to catch everything early.
Once Ferenc thinks it's stable and I tested stuff, I package the whole version (i.e Avisynth, the plugins, x264, x265 etc) so that from that point forward nothing changes.
At that point, the whole build moves to the dev environment where we experiment a bit, we create new workflows etc 'cause one thing is Avisynth development and another is Avisynth based workflow creation (in dev we do the latter).
Once the workflows are fine and behave as expected, we move everything to non prod.
There, everything is rigorously checked and tested with non regression testing (we have a textbook with various files in various formats and we check to see that the results are actually as we expected).
Once everything is good and signed off, we move to prod. :)

Needless to say, we constantly find a lot of bugs, not in Avisynth per se, the core is rock solid by the time Ferenc releases stuff, but in Indexers most of the time and of course in muxers...

[FranceBB]

By the way, even right now the farm (which comprises several servers) is encoding lots of files at the same time:

https://i.imgur.com/t7S41pF.png

[GAP]

I think the answer to the original question is: "Because the newer it is, the gooder it is" :p

People think most of the time that if it's new, it must be fancy and be better than anything before it. I recently tried to adapt myself to the new MS Outlook (been marked as "new" for a year or something now?) at work for three days and had to give up because it is so bad both UI- and functionality-wise compared to the current stable one.

I can relate to that. AVISynth is "outdated" but it is still relevant to many video converters I used.