what order is processing done in?

[bobkoure]

Does the video go through the AviSynth filters before or after being passed to the encoder?
I would guess that it's before, but would like to know.
Sometimes I've already encoded an entire movie and would like to just play "what if" by modifying .AVS files - and am not sure if I can just press "Rebuild" - or need to run "Encode" again.
I'd love to know what sorts of files each "stage" is building - this has probably been mentioned in a post, I've tried to absorb as much as I can, but I guess I missed this one - so a link would be really helpful.
Thanks!
Bob

[wmansir]

Before, AviSynth decodes the original video (does some processing) and then feeds it to CCE for encoding.

I'll give you a short overview of what happens:


Prepare
Most of the files are created here. They are:

Rebuilder.inf
Contains info about the project settings, it's progress and properties for each cell.
XXX.d2v files
Each VTS to be re-encoded gets a .d2v. These files are like a map of the original video files (VOBs), it tells AviSynth how to decode it.
Vxxxxxxxxx.flg files
Each cell gets a .flg file. These files contain flags from the original video file, on rebuild they are applied to the new video to recreate the exact video structure.
vxxxxxxxxx.avs files
Each cell gets a .avs file. These files tell AviSynth how to stream the video from each cell to CCE. The .avs file does several things. It decodes the video from the original .VOB, cuts out just the cell segment we are interested in, peforms any special steps (deinterlace, resize, custom filters), converts it to a format CCE will accept, and adds a fake audio track to work around a CCE bug (if needed).
Rebuilder.ECL
Contains CCE instuctions (jobs) for encoding all the video cells.
[/list=1]
Encode
[list=1]
item.ecl
The CCE job for the current cell to be encoded is copied into this file. It is then loaded into CCE and the encoding begins.
Vxxxxxxxxx.vaf
During the first pass CCE creates this file which contains information about the video it gathers during the first pass.
vxxxxxxxxx.m2v
After the first pass the reencoded video is output to this file.

Rebuild
During rebuild DVD-RB looks at the rebuilder.inf and then takes the reencoded video (.m2v), applies the flags (.flg), and muxes it with the selected audio and subtitle tracks from the original source.

[bobkoure]

Thanks!

From this, it's pretty clear that I need to re-run "encode" if I've made any AviSynth changes (and want to see the changes reflected in the new VOBs).
Time for me to figure out how to get AviSynth to read directly from VOB files so I can mess about with filter settings and see what they're doing (I'll go post a question in the appropriate forum...)
Bob

[favalos]

SO USEFUL ... thanks

[bobkoure]

For the sake of completeness, the answer I got about AviSynth reading directly from VOBs is here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=518873).

[harpseal]

Wow, thanks wmansir. That's a great info.

harpseal

[Faust2]

@ bobkoure

I read your thread in the avisynth forum; maybe this is of some help...

A simple method to check filter usage is to use rb-opt. You can find it in the overview stickie in the rb-forum. Just put rb in three-click-mode, run prepare (without any special filters), open the created rebuilder.inf in rb-opt, go to "AVS-Editing", insert the filters after the trim-command, and preview the changed script. But you have to put the required dlls in the avisynth-plugin-folder first, or they won't get loaded. And btw, i wouldn't use other Decoders than mpeg2deg3dg (see the installation stickie), because rb doesn't support it.

good luck!
PS: IMHO Undot().Deen() does sheer magic on noisy sources (although its slows down encoding a lot)...