What exactly is frameserving?

[kissvid]

HI all,

I have heard about frameserving and i'm not quite sure what it is. Here's my situation. I have a dance recital that i did on Premeire. It's 2 hours and 20 min. I will be doing dolby digital encoding to lessen the amount of space to use. My concern is that I don't have enough drive space to make a new AVI like I usually do to encode. Someone told me that I don't have to do it if I have premiere. I have tmpgenc but I am going to try cinemacraft which I have a copy of...i do't know about avisynth or some of the other tools because tmpgenc never required it. If anyone out there can help me it would be greatly appreciated. I have searched the forums but can't find any other topic with my exact situation.

Marc

[teegee420]

Here is a guide for frameserving to TMPGEnc. The idea is as the name implies. You "serve" frames of the movie from one program to another. Definitely a smart move if conserving HD space is a concern.

[kissvid]

Is there a guide for CCE? That's what i am going to use...doing a 3 pass vbr.

Marc

[teegee420]

I believe you can frameserve with Virtualdub to CCE the same way. Otherwise you'll have to use Avisynth. You'll have to search for Avisynth guides yourself unless someone else is nice enough to post a link. My knowledge of it is fairly limited. I cheat and use Aviscript.

[Perro Grande]

Frameserving is a great way to avoid the creation of large (and time consuming) intermediary files.

Instead of creating an actual intermediary file, the frameserving process creates a "dummy avi." Whatever application you are using to read that avi is (hopefully) clueless that it isn't operating on an actual avi file. The frameserving application delivers up the frames as they are requested.

This is really useful when you want to, for example, create an MPEG file from an AVI that you have captured. However, if the AVI needs to be edited, filters applied, etc, NORMALLY you would end up saving to a new avi file.

for example (using virtual dub):

capture AVI file
edit avi file and apply filters using Virtual Dub
Save to disk
Open saved avi in CCE, Main Concept, TMPG (etc) and produce your MPEG2 file.


With frameserving:

capture AVI
edit avi and apply filters in Virtual Dub
start the frameserver process in virtual dub and create a "dummy" avi file
Open dummy avi file in CCE, Main Concept, TMPG (etc) and produce your MPEG 2 file.

The big advantage of the latter is twofold:

1) No diskspace used for the intermediate, edited AVI file.
2) No time-consuming write to disk of the intermediate AVI.

The disadvantage is that you never really have the edited avi file. If for some reason you would actually need it, it doesn't really exist. You would have to go back and create it again.