Author Archives: Fredrik Mellbin

R38 – BoxBlur is Best Blur

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This release is mostly kind of a bug fix with minor enhancements as well. Nothing exciting but the restrictions of several filters were re-examined and relaxed a bit to match what the actual code can handle. As a result Transpose doesn’t care about subsampling anymore, horizontal and vertical convolutions have a larger element limit and AverageFrames can average over even more frames. Not very exciting at all for most people.

The other part is the addition of a box blur filter. The main attraction is that it can be used to approximate large radius Gaussian blurs very quickly. Or simply a large area average.

This release dragged on for far too long.

Possibly breaking changes:

  • ImageMagick7 is now required for the imwri plugin
  • Visual Studio 2017 is now officially required to build on windows

FFMS2000 – Help Test the Future

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The past few weeks I’ve spent quite a bit of time re-factoring and updating FFMS2 and the result is now ready for initial testing in this doom9 thread. It’s a much needed update to clear out all unnecessary old hacks and finally deal with a few issues.

Report all regressions you find here or over att doom9 and I’ll try to fix with them.

R37 – Maintaining Things Again

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R37 has been released. It’s mostly just a collection of bug fixes. Ironically the Avisynth 2.6 API was the cause of several of them in AVFS. Expect a long rant about this later.

Note: Both the installer and portable archives were updated to fix various compilation issues so if you experience crashes on resizing/missing dll errors you should re-download.

FFMS 2.23 – Trigger Warning

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Why do we need a trigger warning you ask? Because the mere idea of FFMS2 being updated is a big shock to most people? No. In fact it was caused by me once again declaring that XP is a dead end. This time using slightly different wording. If you meet any of these unfortunate users in real life don’t tell them that XP support ended long ago. They may go on a violent rampage or even worse, be offended.

Also a pile of bugs got fixed but nobody actually cares about that, after all we’ve now got a controversy surrounding this release and that’s more interesting.

XP Background

Look at this image and remember the good old times that were actually shit

R34 – Being Nice to Avisynth

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I actually did test this release. I mean it. Not like the previous one where only the core parts got tested. Anyway, this release fixes all known regressions that appeared in R33 and optimizes several internal functions. It also adds support for handling pre-multiplied alpha in MaskedMerge and a PreMultiply filter to apply it.

VSFS was removed and replaced with AVFS, importing all improvements such as faster mount speed and other fixes. The codebase was also unified for both Avisynth and VapourSynth to make maintaining it less annoying in the future. But wait! There’s more! When using recent Avisynth+ builds it can now output exactly the same high bitdepth formats as VapourSynth! Interestingly this makes AVFS considerably better than the current VFW output of Avisynth+.

Possibly breaking changes:

  • Temporalsoften plugin no longer included because it’s horrible, use FrameAverage from miscfilter instead
  • AVFS doesn’t have shell integration unlike the older VSFS

Blindly Copying Avisynth Considered Harmful

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Some Avisynth filters are really, really popular and show up many scripts. Some of them like RemoveGrain and TemporalSoften have even been ported because they’re useful and used in so many scripts.

…But what is TemporalSoften really used for?

TemporalSoften is the definition of cargo cult programming, its code and concept gets copied over and over again and nobody knows exactly why. Let’s start with a few facts:

  • TemporalSoften is a horribly bad temporal smoother even compared to its competition over 10 years ago
  • TemporalSoften has never been used to unironically denoise anything the past 10 years

With these facts in mind you have to wonder why anyone’d ever put it in a script from the past decade. The answer is simple, if you set the denoising thresholds to their max values you get a filter that averages an odd number of frames. If you’re creative you can blend several frames with different weights. That’s actually kinda useful sometimes. So useful someone already wrote an Avisynth plugin for it. It’s a shame that it was fairly quickly forgotten. Unfortunately nobody who ported TemporalSoften to VapourSynth stopped to think about what it was actually used for and instead a very optimized version of TemporalSoften was created. And rewritten. And optimized a bit more. Because why not?

To try to counter this madness I’ve made a collection of small useful and experimental functions available. The first version can be found in this thread. Go try it and stop blending frames with TemporalSoften.