I finally took the time to figure out AVISynth, and it is by far one of the coolest programs I’ve found in years. It’s a free, open source, script-based video editor. (Sorry, PC only, but apparently the next major release will have a Mac version.)

So you edit your videos by writing a textfile script telling it to load video files and then do various operations on them. And it can do pretty much anything I’d ever need to do: crop, resize, splice, denoise, titles, mix, fade, adjust color levels, etc. And if it doesn’t have the filter you need built in, somebody’s probably written a plugin filter that does it.

But what’s even cooler is that it doesn’t output the videos as files — it installs itself as a codec so that the script files are seen as video files to other programs. So you can open a script with Windows Media Player and it will play as if it’s a video file, since AVISynth just executes the script and feeds the edited video frames to the program. This can save a lot of disk space since you rarely will have to save actual video files of edits you do. But if you want to create a video file of your edits, you can open the script in VirtualDub and then encode it into whatever format you want.

The other really cool thing is that any edits you do are self documenting, since the script is already a list of all the editing you are doing. And I love that it’s such a small program that uses minimal resources. I suspect it will run on pretty minimal hardware that you wouldn’t even think about trying to run Premiere on.

[re: image above, Watching all six Star Wars movies simultaneously, an internet sensation you may remember from a while back, was made with AVISynth]