VapourSynth Preprocessing with AVFS

No, this is not a feature request. More of a FYI post, really.

I requested support for VapourSynth once. It got denied. Which is fine, as you can still use VapourSynth, only indirectly. Let me introduce you to the AV FileSystem What this does, is allow you to mount a VapourSynth script in the filesystem, so it appears as a real, uncompressed avi file, which you can then simply browse for with TVAI.

Why is this so important, you ask? For me, because I have been plagued with TVAI’s dismal denoising techniques. Problem is, the A.i gets in the way, it seems. Sometimes it thinks the noise actually is something useful (and then does something dreadful with it), and sometimes it decides the noise is just noise (to paraphrase Freud). So, a custom, pre-pass, quality denoiser (such as they exist in VapourSynth) was really needed for me.

Works something like this:

PS D:\jobs> cmd
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22621.1105]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

D:\jobs>avfs.exe f:\jobs\test.vpy
Mount point: C:\Volumes\test.vpy
Press CTRL+C to exit.

Now you can let TVAI browse to your mounted movie (now a virtual .avi), and let TVAI do its thang. AVFS comes prebundled with VapourSynth itself.

Happy rendering! :slight_smile:

4 Likes

I just managed to get this to work, but not without a little difficulty. I kept running into ERROR: Unable to open PFM interface. PFM probably not installed.

Turns out you have to actually run pfm-192-vapoursynth-win install from an elevated command prompt to install it because the installation process for vapoursynth just gives you a copy of the installer (in the pismo folder if you use the installer, or in the root folder if you got the portable version) but doesn’t actually install it.

It might be because I did a per-user installation instead of an installation for all users (which requires admin permissions) that meant it didn’t get installed as part of the vapoursynth installation.

Anyway, thanks for this tip! I really needed a way to crop black borders from a video before processing it in TVAI, and AVFS just solved that for me wonderfully.