Frameserving from Premiere Pro CC 2019 to FFmpeg

This article discusses how to set up frameserving from Adobe Premiere CC 2019 or later for great results with free software.

A while ago while working on batches of video edits, I came to the realisation that frameserving is simply the best, most flexible way to encode in some cases. Time marches on, and so did my software - eventually I came to a new machine, new Premiere Pro and - disaster - no apparent support for frameserving. Just when I needed it...

Cleverer people than me have solved the CC2019 problem - for those of you editing in Premiere it's once again fairly easy to frameserve encode. However, it did take a bit of sleuthing to figure out a few things; this tutorial should help you to avoid the same problems I encountered.

November 2019: Vouk's excellent Voukoder plugin for After Effects and Premiere can now accomplish some of what this article covers, and it has an active developer and user community. Vouk includes the FFmpeg/libav filters to enable things like bwdif deinterlacing. There are still some bugs but it's worth a test - it should integrate nicely into an AME or batch workflow. More complicated workflows may still benefit from frameserving, so it's still worthwhile to do.

July 2020: wangqr, the developer of the dfscPremiere.prm patch, informed me by email that he's not maintaining it any more as it's been merged into the main Debugmode Frameserver repository. Download v3.0 for use with CC2019 and above. Thank you for your hard work, Q!

Spoiler: it's a little bit of work, not very difficult, and the results are great

MaxMind GeoLite v1 databases discontinued - install GeoLite2

I noticed recently that a few web sites are miscategorising my ISP's static IP as being in the wrong country. I knew it was a recent reallocation of a new block and suspected the web sites were using a stale version of a GeoIP database - probably MaxMind's GeoLite v1 offering.

If you see stuff like this while surfing the web, your IP is probably in the same boat:

It's such a stupid problem, but it's all due to lazy server admins or designers

Schwing!

I've had really crummy quality audio clips from Wayne's World as my phone notification sounds for years -- thought it was time I make my own better ones from my DVD, and publish them online for other people who also want their phone to go "schwing!" for every Whatsapp. 😉

Here's four clips I particularly enjoy.




Replacing a FiiO E7 battery - simple! (Photos)

I've had a FiiO E7 headphone amp for a few years and it's recently gained a new lease of life -- as an audio interface! However, the OEM battery got a bit long in the tooth, so I set about replacing it. It's much easier than you might think. Click through for photos and step-by-step instructions, plus a list of components to buy. (Warning: magnifying glass and hot glue gun are advantageous!)

I've had a FiiO E7 headphone amp for a few years and it's recently gained a new lease of life -- as an audio interface for my LG G3! Sadly, the has G3 shockingly bad audio quality from its onboard 3.5 mm output - riddled with noise, fuzz/hiss and audible aliasing and distortion. This is likely due to poor design from LG in an effort to power save, combined with a latent bug in Android relating to how it scales audio samples, the latter sounding like it's aliasing audio in a certain range of gain due to it internally resampling or something stupid like that. My old Galaxy S3 LTE running Cyanogenmod 10 (4.2.2) sounded amazing, I wish it hadn't died!

ANYWAY! Recent builds of Android (I'm running 5.1) include a provision for audio-via-USB, enabled by default on most devices, so hooking up a micro-to-mini USB cable between the phone and the E7 gives you blissfully great audio quality.

So, I dug mine out of a cupboard - with a flat battery, of course - and charged it up. Soon after, the battery got fat and decided to push the front of the screen out... Ok, time to replace the battery! Continue reading "Replacing a FiiO E7 battery - simple! (Photos)"

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