House of Leaves

There are still people out there, who are very intimidated by avisynth and how to use it to prepare their sources. So I compiled example scripts and tried to break the necessary steps down into easy to follow instructions. Everything is better and more detailed explained in this part of the A&E's guide - The 'A&E's technical guide to All Things Audio and Video' contains a lot of information and is maybe overwhelming, if you just start out with Avisynth and don't feel so confident. But you should follow it step for step while installing the software you need, which is compiled here in AMVapp.

If you followed these instructions you have among other things Avisynth installed and DGIndex. I assume I won't need to explain ripping, once that is done open DGIndex and then make sure you have Audio -> Output Method -> Disable and Video -> Field Operation -> Honor Pulldown Flags selected.

Press F2, select the ripped vobs. I always select the whole DVD, click open then press OK. Now you see a timeline on the button of your screen, go into the middle of a ep and press F6. A windows pops up with all kinds of information, press ESC and take a closer look at the window. Aspect ratio, frame rate, frame type and field order are listed there and are the important ones. I make a index subfolder in the shows folder and save all .d2v files there, because otherwise it might get confusing, if you have several DVDs and seasons. Now press F4 - rename the file to your liking forexampleS1D1 and press okay.

It is possible that when DGIndex is finished indexing that a error message pops up telling you that a field order transition was detected. Say yes to the correction. Now it tells you that the original was saved with the extension .bad, press okay and close the editor file. You should have two files, one d2v and one avs. (If for some reason there wasn't an avs-file autocreated, just drag your d2v into AvsPmod and viola, that file would be automatically an avs-file when saved.) Okay, next DVD same game, F2 - delete the old files and add the new ones. then press okay. F4 and rename it to your liking and I think you get the idea. If you move your vob-files later onto another hard drive or folder, you must reindex. (There is a trick to avoid this reindexing, if you open the d2v-file with notepad and the use ctl-h and replace the hard drive-letter.)

Now you should have installed another program AvsPmod - it is a tool that helps you edit Avisynth files and has an awesome preview function. If you open the avs-file that DGIndex created with this program and press F5 you have a preview. You will get something like this and I added the second line to get rid of deinterlacing.

mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x01-1x04.d2v", cpu=6)
LeakKernelDeint(order=1) # Fast Deinterlacer

So this is good enough to import into Premiere, but it might not be the way you prefer your footage. For example I like to have a whole season in one file and that is the beauty of Avisynth, it lets you do all kinds of stuff to your footage with just one line of code. Isn't that impressive and neat? All you need is the ++ between the files and they become one file you can use to edit in Premiere.

mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS5x01-5x04.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS5x05-5x08.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS5x09-5x11.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS5x12-5x15.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS5x16-5x19.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS5x20-5x22.d2v", cpu=6) # Full season

Now I have footage that has a few problems, I like to fix. First it is interlaced in PAL, then it is 4:3 and I don't want that, so I'll crop the frame to 16:9 with the focus slightly up in the frame, because it looks better that way for me and then resize it to PAL.

mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x01-1x04.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x05-1x08.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x09-1x11.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x12-1x15.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x16-1x19.d2v", cpu=6) ++ mpeg2source("X:\AtS\Index\AtS1x20-1x22.d2v", cpu=6) # Full season
Telecide(order=1,guide=2) # PAL-Deinterlacing
Crop(8,40,-8,-104) # Cropping the footage to 16:9
LanczosResize(720,576) # Resize it to PAL-resolution

Not bad, huh? Okay, but what about downloaded eps? There are several clip attributes that play pretty much every format available. Ususally if you drag a video file into AvsPmod it gives it the clip attribute that is predefined. I prefer FFmpegSource2 for my footage, because it doesn't mesh up my mkvs and again it indexes the video files when they are first loaded for example for the preview and this index gives you frame accuracy. Just dump the contents of the downloaded file into your Avisynth plugin folder and it should work. To load this script for the first time you should be ready to wait a few minutes, while the vidfiles get indexed.

FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x01.mpg") ++ FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x02.mpg") ++ FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x03.mpg") ++ FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x04.mpg") # Full season
LanczosResize(720,576) # Resize it to PAL-resolution
AssumeFPS(25) # PAL framerate
ConvertToRGB32 # Colorspace for Premiere

Again the cool thing about avisynth is the ability to combine files, if they have the same resolution and framerate. If not you'll get an error message.

FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x01.mkv") ++ FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x02.mkv") ++ FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x03.mkv") ++ FFmpegSource2("X:\...\exampleshow1x04.mkv") # Full season
LanczosResize(720,576) # Resize it to PAL-resolution
AssumeFPS(25) # PAL framerate
ConvertToRGB32 # Colorspace for Premiere

Again I'm not an expert and these are basically the way I set my footage up. But I might be able to answer some question.