Premiere feeding CCE + avisynth filters?

[Z-C]

Hi everyone.

I know that there's an option to add CCE as a plugin for premiere, so after editing you can simply save the file as MPEG2 using CCE.
Is it possible to add some avisynth filters in between that will be used while encoding?

And for those of you who have tried this combination before - is the CCE plugin as strong as the original?

With Regards,
Guy.

[guns1inger]

The only way I can think of to add avisynth filters into the mix would be to use the Debugmode Frameserver to frameserve from Premiere, through avisynth and into CCE as a standalone encoder.

[Z-C]

Thank you.

Will that be as efficient & as fast as using CCE plugin?

[guns1inger]

CCE stand alone and CCE plugin are basically the same engine.

The caveat I would put on a process like this is that it is only good for short clips or single pass encoding. If you want to do mutli-pass encoding I would save the whole lot to a lossless avi, then use CCE to encode that.

[Z-C]

Why is it not suitable for long videos and multipass?

[pijetro]

Personally, i've found that encoding off the timeline (especially multipasss) was slower than feeding CCE an AVISynth script, or an .AVI file for that matter..
As far as multipass, the biggest problem is functionality. With the CCE plugin, you're at the mercy of your timeline being up and running, rather than simply opening up CCE as a standalone and doing an extra encode with an existing .VAF file. Or for that matter, opening up an .ECL file to load up the project...

As guns1inger says,
Save out as .AVI, and feed the AVISynth script to CCE...
or
Encode off the timeline with existing Premiere filters for the plugin of CCE...

One or the other.

[guns1inger]

The other issue with multipass, even from an avisynth script, is how long it takes to process. I have just finished a two hour video. The cleanup script took 12 hours for a single pass. The do a two pass (2 + 1) VBR encode in CCE would have taken 36+ hours to complete. However by saving to a lossless avi file (lagarith) after a single pass through the avisynth script, then encoding in CCE, the whole thing took less than 16 hours. I let the processing pass complete overnight, then the next afternoon did the encoding.

[pijetro]

@guns1inger

Assuming the video was initially DV....Are you suggesting recompressing out to lossless .AVI (lagarith), and then using this video to serve to CCE??
Is that to say that the lagarith codec decompresses 3x faster than the DV codec?? If so, how long does it take to save out to lagarith initially??

That's simply amazing!!!

[guns1inger]

Don't get too excited. What I am saying is that somes the amount of processing required per pass makes multi-pass encoding of avisynth or frameserved timelines very time consuming. In these cases, you may be better off saving to a lossless format, then using the new file to encode with cce.

So you have

Porcess and 2 pass (2+1) VBR encode with CCE
Pass - 1 12 hours to process
Pass - 2 12 hours to process
Pass - 3 12 hours to process
Total - 36 hours (+/-)

Verus

Process and save to lossless format - 12 hours
2 pass VBR in CCE (2+1) - 4 hours
Total - 16 hours

[Z-C]

guns1inger: What speed do you get when encoding lagarith footage in CCE? I get 0.54x max and that's after turning on Multithreading. And on what machine?

I guess I will move to ffdshow's HuffYUV. I can get a encoding speed of around 1x-2x in CCE with it.

And as a conclusion I guess the best option is really lossless->standalone CCE

[guns1inger]

For short (<= 1 hour) I use CBR straight from avisynth. If it is VBR and I am filtering, then I usually save to an intermediate file and then encode from that. If I am just doing a resize and encode then I will go VBR straight from avisynth as the speed difference is negligable.

If you use Lagarith, make sure you save as YUY2, not RGB. Lagarith seems slower in RGB mode, and CCE also has to convert colourspace, which slows things down again. My machine specs are in my posts (hover over the little Computer tag next to Profile), but for Lagarith I get maybe slightly slower than DV.