ETA

[lierdumoa]

Vid problem solved!

And here is where I stop speaking English.

So the thing is, avisynth couldn't read the files properly. But it could read them. It just got confused if you tried to put more than one of the clips in an avisynth script, thinking for some bizarre reason that they were in different file formats. All files must be of the same format in an avisynth script.

However it could read if only one file was put in the script. So I made all the clips into one giant clip. Yay Virtualdub! And I didn't have to re-render anything so no quality loss. SCORE.

Though as it turns out, the point is moot because I can't vid directly with all of my clips. Premiere can only take about half an hour worth of the high res clips (about 1/5 of the total clips needed) before it crashes. But that is OKAY. I am NOT STRESSED. I mean, it would be one thing if it couldn't take the high res clips at all, but a half hour's worth? This I can totally work with. I will just make the vid at low quality and then substitute in only the high res clips I need to make the vid once all the editing is done, which only adds on, like, a day, maybe two of extra work, which is totally doable.

And it doesn't even mess with my previous plans, because see, I only needed the high res for the MASSIVE and EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE matting/color tweaking/compositing I was going to have to do in After Effects. And I wasn't going to do that until I had finished all the editing anyway.

I'm behind schedule on the clipping, since it's going to take yet another day to make low res versions of all my clips. But, not so much that I can't make up for it.

::happy place, goddamnit::

I have officially gotten over the first large hurdle in this vid. WINZ.

Comments

[zoerayne]

Okay, since you are obviously totally brilliant, answer me this:

I have .avi files that I want to vid with. Usually when I'm working with things ripped from DVD, I just pull the .vob files into VDub to clip what I want. But VDub doesn't like my .avi files. It moves very, very slowly when you're trying to shift up and down the timeline to figure your in/out points to clip. Using an avisynth script speeds it up for a while, but it seems to bog down eventually (or toward the end of the file, I'm not sure which). OMG, WTF am I doing wrong? *cries*

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Any frame that isn't a keyframe can only be displayed by processing all the frames that came after the last keyframe. This is slow.

However, vdub has this all worked out. When scrubbing, hold down shift. Voila, fast searching - it goes from keyframe to keyframe and is hence very quick. Also handy for finding scene changes too :)

[zoerayne]

It's not the real-time speed that I object to; 25 or 30fps is fine for scanning through the file, and I drag the thingy if I need to go faster. (Though the shift trick for scrubbing is handy, thank you.) But when I use .avi files, and especially when I'm going backwards (with the left arrow key), I get about 1 fps. And the files seem to get worse the closer to the end you get, though I'm not sure if that's because I'm filling up some buffer somewhere and so it's the total data processed rather than the position in the file causing the problem or what.

I suspect that I just need to clip far less precisely than I want in VDub, and then fiddle more with the in/out points of the clips in Premiere. *sigh*

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Again though it's the same principle - when you use the left arrow key it has to decode all the frames leading up to the one you want because the frame you want is not a keyframe.

If you want to do fast moving, use shift and the left arrow. It won't be as precise (as the keyframes only happen every so often) but it's easier to decode frame after the keyframe so from a key frame you can use the right arrow on its own to go forward until you get the frame you want. This is quicker than going backwards and having to do all the slow decoding.

[zoerayne]

Yeah, I think that's going to have to be how I do it. At least it's workable, as opposed to before I discovered avisynth, when I had to scrap a Club Vivid vid because I couldn't even clip.

Thank you. (I'll buy you a drink at VVC. *g*)

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Hey, this is probably unnecessary as you are way, way further ahead on the tech curve than me, but are you using this method for the substitution part? I can't tell from the above, but it works, and it's quicker than having to put high-res clips into place by hand. Best of luck!

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I can't use that method in this situation. Trying to import even a quarter of the footage in high res that I can import in low res crashes premiere, and switching out only works if the low res and high res files are a frame by frame match. I'm going to have to make a new avs once I'm done with only the specific clips used in the vid.