Workflow help

[magillagorilla]

Hey all,
I am restoring all kinds of video (family shot stuff). So far I have Avisynth doing 80% of the work. Avisynth is doing my deinterlace, titles, and removedirt, which is awesome. I am serving it up to VirtualDub where I am adding a black boarder and doing some chroma denoising, and maybe a little NeatVideo on really bad footage. The Camcorder denoise in VirtualDub is really nice.

So my plan is to run all my filters on my clips, of which there are many, then batch encode them to h.264

I was trying a batch front end for HandBrake with minimal succes. I keep getting a nondescriptive error.

Is there any way to eliminate some of these steps? Maybe I could do all filtering in AviSynth then serve it to something to encode directly? I don't know. Any thoughts? I have Vegas MS if that's any help.

[magillagorilla]

OK, I guess my post was all over the place. How about a basic question. What can I use to batch encode AVI to a high quality h.264 while retaining the input file names?

[poisondeathray]

It might be possible to do all your filtering in avs scripts, and many vdub filters can be called by avisynth e.g. LoadVirtualDubPlugin
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/LoadVirtualdubPlugin

You can batch encode with x264 using scripts and CLI, or even through ffmpeg, but you can look for some GUI's that have this functionality e.g. ASXGUI, there might be some others
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=142502

Here are some posts that describe how to setup a batch file for x264 , the one in the 1st post calls neroaac and mp4box as well. There are batch avs scripters as well if you need to generate avs files. x264 doesn't need avisynth anymore, you can input AVI directly
http://doom10.org/index.php?topic=212.0
http://doom10.org/index.php?topic=218.0

[magillagorilla]

Thanks PDR,
I keep thinking there is a way to process (filter) everything in AviSynth. I can't get some rather stupid things to work like black boarders. The boarders filter in AVISynth rescales my images, yuck. If I can get the camcorder chroma noise filter from VDUB to work in AVISynth that would be a bonus. Does anyone know if Neat Video works in AVISynth or a "just as good" denoiser native to AVISynth. I know there are many, I just like Neat Video.

Thanks for the tips on x264 batching.

The other angle I was thinking about; is there a way to feed AVISynth directly in to an x264 encode? Maybe there is an x264 encoder that can be frame served by AVISynth?

I have have at least 20 hours of video to process. I don't mind tweaking the filters for each clip because they all have different needs. Ideally I'd like to do the majority of the processing (filtering, rendering) while I'm sleeping or at work. The problem is that when I get all the filters just the way I like them I render it to lossless AVI and go to bed. Then if I get a chance (I usually don't) I'll run it through the encoder the next morning. Realistically I get to step 2 when I get home from work, start it and go to bed. This makes the process take 2-3 days per clip because I have to "hand load" it to the next step.

Batching, cussing out VDUB, or frame serving directly to an x264 output would save me a lot of time.