I’m trying to use AVS for processed intermediaries, deinterlacing and resizing my footage before sending it to Blender, without needing to set aside space for more of the same shots. I’ve been scouring the forums and assorted Blender sites for documentation on using AVISynth scripts inside of Blender, but the process has been somewhat overwhelming and I haven’t gotten anything to work, so I now posit my questions to the Blender community.
Is Blender still being compiled with AVS functionality by default? Or is there a particular build I can grab off GraphicAll that has the required setting? I read that a few months ago it was, and the file browser recognizes .avs as a valid video file, but it doesn’t show a thumbnail preview, and whenever I try to add it to the timeline I get a “Can Not Load” error.
Do I need to use any third party plugins in the actual script? I have experimented with multiple avi files with different codecs, in addition to switching between DirectShowSource and AVISource, and none of that seems to make Blender more cooperative.
Do you have any links/examples you could point me to? I think that I’ve been pretty thorough, but I always manage to miss something.
Blender uses ffmpeg for video import, ffmpeg on Windows can be compiled with avs script processing, most of the Windows builds available even by 3rd party providers over at Graphicall.org use precompiled ffmpeg .dll’s, the dll’s are compiled by blender devs, last time I looked that was Sergy, I contacted him a while back and we exchanged a few emails but my enquiry as to why ffmpeg on windows didn’t have that simple avs script compile option enabled had no response and fell on deaf ears.
It has been possible to download shared windows builds of ffmpeg from here: http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ which include avs support and if lucky swap out the .dlls provided with a Windows build of blender with those and be able to import avs scripts like they were a video file.
BUT getting the right version numbers to correspond with the .dlls provided by blender is a crap shoot.
Being a linux user and don’t use blender as a video editor because…list is too long, therefore use Avisynth + Wine and AvxSynth on Linux for any pre or post processing like denoising, sharpening etc, unfortuneatly I have no interest trying to compile Windows builds of blender with avs support there’s many regulars building blender for windows who could do it if they were inclined to.
As an aside, video import into blender is a bit of a mess for many camera sources due to the conversion to 8bit RGB by ffmpeg at import something that could be helped a little with avisynth support alternatively controlled conversion outside of blender to image sequences and import those but understand it’s not necessarily everyones choice.
The blog is actually where I got interested in using AVS. I usually use it as a reference if I can’t remember something or if I’m looking for a plugin, since it’s pretty much the most thorough resource I’ve found. Most websites stop long before they get to three point editing.
So, I found the rough range for when the right dll’s were released, and at some point I might just chug through the list to find the exact right ones. I’ve tried a handfull, renaming the orignal dlls as .bak’s, but they’ve all crashed blender when importing video. So my next question is this: do either of you currently have a working setup?
Also: should I be concerned about all the shared binaries, including those which are not included with Blender? So far each release has required avfilter-2, but that’s not a default dll.
