Frameserving CVD to CCE

[sammie]

I've always had a lot of luck doing CVD's for DVD-R with TMPEGenc, but I've recently grown frustrated with the time involved. I'm trying to upgrade to CCE. I saw one response to this question which suggested using the AVIsynth resize. If I use one of the AviSynth resize (BicubicResize or LanczosResize) do I need to click the HalfD1 horizontal button inside CCE? Should/can I just do this instead of resizing with AviSynth? Pros and cons?

I know, I'll try a test file or two tonight, but I'm hoping someone has the anwer here. Also, as a general question there are lots of tMPEGenc templates available here and elsewhere, but so far I haven't found any similar CCE templates except those that come with the package. Anyone know a good source for these or example encoding profiles? Looking for hi quality CVD and DVD templates specifically.

[fantomlord]

I don't believe you need to check that button--but I could be mistaken.

[sammie]

Hmm, ok the good news using AviSynth 2.6 and CCE 2.63 selecting the halfD1 button doesn't seem to do anything if you frameserve. The bad news is that frameserving with this combo seems to give a file with no audio and just a plain grey image (meaning nothing at all!) Right size, length, number of frames, just no image. I think I've got the audio figured out. AviSyth can't handle compressed wave files. No biggie I split the audio out already anyway, but the video? Any help here? There were no errors and doesn't seem to be anything in the log file that looks amiss.

[Poplar]

CCE 2.63? Never heard of that version. We have CCE SP 2.50, 2.62, 2.64, 2.66. Where did you get 2.63?

Anyhoo, as far as CVD is concerned, you need to resize with Avisynth and frameserve to CCE. CCE SP 2.50 and 2.66 offer AVS support, so you better use these two versions. And always export elementary streams, which means you need to encode video and audio separately. As far as templates are concerned, you can customize your own templates, which gives you more control of your settings.

[sammie]

Sorry, dumb fingers. 2.62 (and AviSynth 2.06 before someone else notices). Guess that explains the no video.

I do have E.S. set in CCE and always process them separately. Do you mean that I need to strip the audio prior to frameserving? I use Virtual Dub to find trim points then use that to split out a wave file before encoding, but that doesn't remove it from the avi.

As far as the templates go, I've not used CCE before. It's always best to have a good starting point and I figure that there ought to be a lot of people out there that have a lot more experience than I do with it.

[Truman]

sammie, I wonder how you managed to load a Avisynth script into ccesp 2.62 ?

[sammie]

That's what has me confused Truman. No problems loading it. No errors or anything. Got a very simlar sized file as direct encoding and exact same number of frames, time reported, etc. Just nothing but a medium gray blank frame playing though.

[Truman]

Did you use VFAPI or link2 to wrap the script?

[sammie]

@Truman
Did both, with wrapped and plain avs. Same results with both. I did have to #out almost all of the filters to get it to load. I thought it was YUY vs. RGB errors at the time. Was planning on going back and working that out once I got the plain serving part worked out.

[sammie]

@ Truman

Probably not worth worrying about the why's. It clearly didn't work. But you seem to have some experience. Would you suggest I download the CCE 2.66 upgrade or uninstall and go back to 2.50? There is another thread about problems with 2.50, but overall that seems to be the suggestion I've heard most.

[Truman]

I never heart, that anyone was able to load an avs into ccesp2.62 directly.
However, you may check, whether the codec, that is used to decompress the source file is installed properly and also check the decoder options of ccesp (option > misc > yuy2/rgb32). Convert the source video to differtent color spaces with Avisynth and do some tests. I know, it is not much help, but at the moment I do not have a better idea.
CCESP has a very basic resize filter. If you select half horizontal resolution, the horiz res will be divided by 2 once again, no matter which Avisynth filters you use or not. I recommend to resize with Avisynth instead.

[Truman]

oops, too late. Yes, ccesp 2.64.01.09 and newer accept *.avs as videosource.
I did not test the latest version yet, because custom tech release a new version every week, but version 2.66 looks promising.

[sammie]

Ok, thanks. I was planning on doing most of the settings in AviSynth once I get it all figured out. Seems like there are a couple of threads here on AviSynth. There also seems to be HUGE gap between the basic FAQs (not much beyond basic syntax) and the Doom9 AviSynth forum (99% minutae of filter settings). Think there is enough interest for a more beginner to middle of the road level forum/topic/guide here? Seems like it would be useful and it's a level of help that seems to be missing now.

[Truman]

I read doom9's Avisynth forum frequently, because you will find the latest news of the developers there. I think the dokumentation and the FAQ at http://avisynth.org are written very well. It's a good base to start.

[sammie]

Ok, here is the latest update. CCE 2.5 would just lock up and crash on trying to load the AVS file. The newest version from the CCE site wouldn't install. Was able to find an older 2.64 version at Visible Light. This loaded the avs fine but wouldn't run. It just loaded a 200 frame file with error messages. After going back through and #'ing out various lines, it became obvious that the script wasn't seeing an avi file. The file I'm using is a standard DV1 avi. No problems loading the AVI directly in to CCE or anything else. I tried all 4 or the of the source commands I could find AviSource openDMLsource, DirectShowSource and aviFileSource . The only one that worked was the aviFileSource and that only worked with small files (<2 gig if memory serves). As I understand it either the openDML or the DirectShowSource should be the right ones.

Any AviSynth guru's here I could send my script off line for comments (identification of the obvious)? Don't want to take up space here with a script unless necessary.

[sammie]

@Truman

I think I've tried avisyth.org, but I'll try there again. The Doom9 is way above my head (and my needs) right now. Do you know if MainConcept encoder reads AVS files? It's rip roaring fast and the quality is already pushing TMPEGenc without a multipass function yet. If you could frameserve to is using the AviSynth filters and editing that may be a real winner combo. I presume that it should work with a VFAPI wrapper regardless.

[sammie]

Hey Truman,

I missed this one. Your own guide is way better than anything I've found elsewhere. It's under User Guides (doh!)

http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99389#vhs

I think the rest of my answer has to lie in the DV1 thing. I may have to just recaptue into some sort of DV2 app (even though I can't explain small files loading with AVIFileSource(). As far as I can see, that shouldn't work at all yet, it's the only one that does.