New AviSynth Revelations; better colors, louder audio

Capturing South Park episodes across the two half-seasons, I wondered why my older caps had "true blacks" and deeper colors, while my newer caps had slightly washed-out colors. I forgot what I did before (I used to think it was because I used DirectShowSource instead of AviSource), but after a lot of searching, all I needed to do was add this:

ColorYUV(levels="TV->PC")

Also, I noticed the low volume of my PSP captures (and pretty much everything else running from the DVDO Edge to the HDfury3 to the Intensity Pro via stereo), and after looking for an easy, consistent way to boost the volume across the videos I already made, it came back to good ol' AviSynth:

AmplifydB(7)

I'm still on the fence about amplifying the volume for TV caps; in my experience, the same PC vids played on a TV are louder, so it's safer for the volume to be "too soft" rather than "too loud." However, video games and even VHS transfers could probably use a boost. I'll still use Audacity and/or Xvid4PSP to come up with a reasonable Amplify volume boost first, then just edit the line in directly in AviSynth.

It's also worth noting that for another one of my video game projects, the intro to a game was much louder than the actual gameplay, so I had to highlight and amplify those parts separately. And of course, the sequels had their own volume differences so I had to do the same thing there. That video also turned out great.

So to summarize, my basic AviSynth script (using PSP gameplay caps, resized & cropped) looks like this:

#Echoshift - A7 Cast

#PSP-DVDOEdge-HDfury3

DirectShowSource("H:\Untitled 7.avi")

ColorYUV(levels="TV->PC")

AmplifydB(7)

ChangeFPS(59.940)

Crop(6,6,-14,-8)

Lanczos4Resize(848,480)

Trim(2683,4643)++Trim(4905,7579)