Intro - Where to get them? - All the Filters
Spatial Smoothers - Temporal Smoothers - Spatio-Temporal Smoothers - Sharpeners - Dealing with Dot Crawl - Dealing with Rainbows

Intro

This guide assumes you're already familiar with AVISynth and how to write scripts. In it, I will attempt to give a rundown of some of the most popular and useful AVISynth filters for filtering AMVs.
I will not be telling you what to use -- every source has different problems that need different solutions. Rather, I'll be explaining how the various filters work, what they're good for, some caveats of each, etc. so that you can figure out which ones would be most effective for any given video.

I owe a good deal of my knowledge of AVISynth filters to Ermac and Absolute Destiny's Guide to All Things Audio and Video; however, its section on AVISynth filters is by now rather outdated. That's part of the reason I wrote this.

The vast majority of these filters were written for AVISynth 2.5.x and will not work on AVISynth 2.0.x or older. It is recommended that you be running version 2.5.6 of AVISynth; Release Candidate 2, released on 10/7/05, can be downloaded from here.

Some general notes:

• Please, don't just blindly use the defaults or recommended settings for each filter -- tweak them to find the settings that work best for your case. It's worth it.
• If you want to know more about these filters, check out the documentation that comes with them (which you really should be doing anyway).

Each filter writeup contains the following information:

• Type: Is it a plugin or a script function?
  • Found in file (plugins only): What .DLL plugin file contains this filter?
  • Requires (scripts only): What plugins does this script require to work correctly?
• Author: Who coded this filter?
• Homepage: Where can you go for more information and updates on this filter?
• Colorspaces: What colorspaces are supported by this filter? If the filter only works in one particular colorspace (usually YV12), this will be noted in bold.
• Interlacing: Will this filter work with interlaced content, or field-based, or progressive only, or whatever? If this filter wasn't designed to properly handle anything but progressive video, this will be noted in bold.
• Speed: How fast is this filter? All speeds were measured using AVSTimer (a plugin by Kassandro) on my Athlon 64 3000+ with frame sizes of 720x480. Your results may be better or worse depending on your hardware.
  (Note: After completing the pages on smoothers, I upgraded my CPU. Therefore, the filters on the last three pages will not have speeds given in frames per second, as it would be pointless for comparison purposes.)
• Defaults: The default parameters for this filter. If there are some parameters that I feel can be safely skipped, I'll skip them. (vmToon, for example, has far too many parameters.)
  • Recommended (optional): The parameters I suggest as a starting point for filtering most anime.
• Parameters: A quick rundown of all the important parameters.
• Usage notes: Anything else special you need to know about the filter before you use it goes here.
• After that, general discussion about the filter, how it works, some of its drawbacks, caveats, etc.

AVISynth can't find my filters!

In any case, there is an easy way to fix this: Make a new script file that contains nothing but a bunch of LoadPlugin() lines, one for each plugin that's failing to auto-load. Save it with the .AVSI extension in your plugins directory; this way it will auto-load and all your plugins will work just as they used to.