AVIsynth + Virtualdub + Lagarith Transcode for AVCHD?

ZephyrStar

ZephyrStar

Active member
I'm just curious as to whether anybody here is familiar with/has tried this method. These softwares/codecs are open source projects, but from what I can tell (and my experience processing animation footage with them) they are worth checking out.

First off, you have AVIsynth, which is a frameserver program. It allows you to write a script through which you can set parameters such as video/audio sources, filters, etc. The script is just plain text, with the extension .avs, and it can be loaded up the same way you would load any other media file.

You can get a plugin for it called FFmpeg, which *should* allow you to frameserve AVCHD. From there you can load the .avs into your NLE, or transcode it using Virtualdub. There is a freeware open source codec called Lagarith, which claims to be lossless and can encode in a few colorspaces.

I find that Lagarith footage is very easy to edit with in Premiere, and seems to be frame accurate. Again, not sure on the quality, but to me it looks just fine. If anybody is interested in trying this out, I can point you to these programs and give you a sample .avs script to get you started. :)
 
ZephyrStar said:
I find that Lagarith footage is very easy to edit with in Premiere, and seems to be frame accurate. Again, not sure on the quality, but to me it looks just fine.
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Never heard of this codec before, but the website says it's using some form of arithmetic compression on top of some motion prediction algorithm. So this will be really lossless, not just visually lossless like wavelet based codecs.

It's most probably still very huge, depending on your source material.
 
Yes, I've found with animation footage at 720p, 22 minutes takes up around 10gb. I would imagine that actual video would take up much more since there would be a lot more detail. Maybe I can get ahold of some footage right off of the HMC150 and see what I can do with it :)
 
pailes said:
Never heard of this codec before, but the website says it's using some form of arithmetic compression on top of some motion prediction algorithm. So this will be really lossless, not just visually lossless like wavelet based codecs.

It's most probably still very huge, depending on your source material.
Click to expand...


You are correct. I used Lagarith quite a bit before getting Cineform. The files are indeed lossless and huge, much larger than Cineform files. But they are still smaller than uncompressed. Also, I have yet to see a computer that can preview or playback Hi-Def Lagarith files in real time. I still use Lagarith on my computer that I don't have Cineform on. Its quite popular on the HV20.com forum.
 
I can't actually play them back in TRUE realtime, but on my old single core they certainly work better than trying to load them into premiere via an .avs script. :p

I've heard of Cineform, my brother uses it quite a bit. Is it lossless?
 
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