Simple text insertion

Probably one of the easiest (yet still very useful) macros you could write would be a macro that simply inserts a chunk of predefined text into your script. Let's say you have a set of filters which you use for cleaning video:

GuavaComb(mode = "NTSC")
PeachSmoother()
Levels(0,1.2,255,0,255)
Convolution3D(preset = "movieLQ")

Here's the macro which inserts this text into the script at the current cursor position:

avsp.InsertText(
'''GuavaComb(mode = "NTSC")
PeachSmoother()
Levels(0,1.2,255,0,255)
Convolution3D(preset = "movieLQ")'''
)

Note the triple-quotes surrounding the text. This is a special string which preserves newlines - if you were to use a normal string, you would need to add a "\n" to the end of every line. To use this macro, copy the text into a text file named "Cleaning filters.py", put it in your "macros" directory, start up AvsP, and it appears in the Macros menu. Easy, huh?

Note: I am fully aware that you may not need macros to accomplish a task like this, since AviSynth itself provides features such as script importing and user-defined functions. Just think of this example as an another option to choose from, there can be a couple advantages to using macros for this purpose, such as having menu access or keyboard shortcuts.

Custom templates

Extending off of the idea of simple text insertion is the idea of custom templates. If like using AvsP's extension-based templates with the Insert source functionality, but find yourself wishing you could have more than one template per extension, you could try using a macro like this:

# Get the filename via an open dialog box
filename = avsp.GetFilename()

if filename:
 # Create a new tab
 avsp.NewTab()
 # Create and insert the script into the tab
 avsp.InsertText(
 'AviSource("' + filename + '")\n'
 'Sharpen(1.0)\n'
 'Info()\n'
 )

This macro is based off the "Template example" macro supplied with the program. When you run this macro, it firsts shows a dialog box to get the filename of the video from the user. If the user clicks OK, then the macro creates a new tab and inserts the specified text into the script. Of course you can change the text given to avsp.InsertText() to be something more realistic than this example. Overall, this is pretty functional for about 10 lines of code!

Batch scripting

Batch scripting refers to the process of generating multiple AviSynth scripts for every file in a directory or set of directories. AvsP's macro facilities allow you to do this in a relatively easy fashion:

import os

# Get the directory containing source files
dirname = avsp.GetDirectory()

if dirname:
 # Generate each of the avisynth scripts
 for filename in os.listdir(dirname):
 fullname = os.path.join(dirname, filename)
 if os.path.isfile(fullname):
 # Get the extension-based template string
 srctxt = avsp.GetSourceString(fullname)
 # Create the script string
 scripttxt = srctxt + '\n' + 'Sharpen(1.0)\nInfo()'
 # Write the script text to a file
 f = open(fullname + '.avs', 'w')
 f.write(scripttxt)
 f.close()

This macro is based off the "Batch example" macro supplied with the program. This one uses a bit more Python than the previous examples. When you run this macro, it firsts shows a dialog to get the name of the directory containing the video sources you wish to make scripts for. If the user clicks OK, then it goes through the list of files in the directory and creates an AviSynth script for each one. Here the function avsp.GetSourceString() is used to get the appropriate source filter for each filename (it gets text similar to AvsP's Insert source functionality). The interesting thing to note here is that this macro doesn't interact with AvsP's interface at all! AvsP's macros can pretty much do anything that Python can do, making them a very powerful tool indeed.

Text related functions

Tab related functions

File opening and saving

Video related functions

Miscellaneous