ffdshow encoding with... MeGUI...?

[ArtOfLosingMFZB]

Never used ffdshow but would like to encode using its "smooth" filter, unless someone can point me in the direction of a filter in Premiere or After Effects that achieves the same result. All I've tried so far is de-grain with a gaussian blur, but it's not quite the same. (Though, tbh, encoding through Premiere is a bit much on my system, so encoding outside of it might be preferable)

Basically the plan currently is to export losslessly from Premiere Pro, and then encode through ffdshow to x264. Would like to apply the "smooth" filter to select portions of the video, while encoding the rest normally. However, I know nothing about ffdshow and it's nigh impossible to find a tutorial or anything about how to encode with it. I'm somewhat familiar with MeGUI and am wondering if that's what I can use to encode with it?

Honestly have very little idea of what I'm talking about at all here, so please clarify what exactly ffdshow is in case I'm completely misunderstanding it. I'm under the impression it's like a playback codec, but you can also encode with it? Maybe...?

Any help would be appreciated, sorry if what I'm asking sounds like a mess.

[VHSCritter]

To recap what I've understood your problem to be:
You did some work in After Effects -> you export that losslessly -> you want to take that output and use ffshow to encode to h264 -- at some point you want to denoise your clip

it's nigh impossible to find a tutorial or anything about how to encode with it

That might be because you mixed up your terms:

ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX or Xvid) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. Final release 1.3.4531 / 28 June 2014

FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a large suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the FFmpeg program itself, designed for command-line-based processing of video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing (trimming and concatenation), video scaling, video post-production effects and standards compliance. Current Stable release 4.4 (April 8, 2021)

In short - ffdshow is mainly for displaying your AV content while ffdshow is the swiss armyknife of everything AV really. You can find documentation for this here. And in the (very nice) wiki.
Note that the general purpose h264 encoder has the most options but runs on the CPU. You can get more speed by using a hardware-encoder like:

V....D h264_amf AMD AMF H.264 Encoder (codec h264)
V....D h264_nvenc NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
V..... h264_qsv H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec h264)

Type ffmpeg -encoders on the cmd prompt to see the full list (or look it up on the wiki)

For your workflow I feel it's easier to have AE output chunks, then postprocess as you like and lastly concat them together.

For denoising in ffmpeg see and also the documentation

There are tons of options for denoising and papers have been (and continue to be) written about it. IMO just go with NLMeans and forget everything else. It's slow(er) but worth it.

Hope that helps!

BTW: Easy mode would be using handbrake -> Filters -> NLMeans (and maybe sharpen) but nothing else.

Also note that (while I dont have or use After Effects) there are ways to denoise beyond the good ol' gauss: youtube has you covered
And here's a nicely written one.

Oh and I'm sure you can wrangle something with megui since it's got avisynth support. Example here. But again - I don't have/use it.

[butterw]

Few people still use ffdshow. It's unclear what filter you are refering to.

Avisynth, ffmpeg or Avidemux can be used to re-encode filtered video. Encoding GUIs such as MeGUI typically use an Avisynth script for filtering.

[El Heggunte]

Never used ffdshow but would like to encode using its "smooth" filter, unless someone can point me in the direction of a filter in Premiere or After Effects that achieves the same result. All I've tried so far is de-grain with a gaussian blur, but it's not quite the same. (Though, tbh, encoding through Premiere is a bit much on my system, so encoding outside of it might be preferable)

Basically the plan currently is to export losslessly from Premiere Pro, and then encode through ffdshow to x264. Would like to apply the "smooth" filter to select portions of the video, while encoding the rest normally. However, I know nothing about ffdshow and it's nigh impossible to find a tutorial or anything about how to encode with it. I'm somewhat familiar with MeGUI and am wondering if that's what I can use to encode with it?

You could use ffdshow's "raw video filter" through Avisynth's DirectShowSource() applied onto a .GRF (DirectShow graph) file.
First you open the lossless intermediate video in GraphStudioNext, disconnect the video renderer from the graph, and add ffdshow to the graph.
Then when you preview the graph through a proper Avisynth script you can select (trim) the segments on which you want to apply ffdshow's video processing.
Finally you concatenate the segments with UnalignedSplice() and let x264 encode the sequence.
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Yeah, that's complicated :–/