However, sometimes this doesn't really show how efficient a script is being or not. If there's a bottleneck happening somewhere in the script that's holding you back from better performance, it can be hard to isolate it from the overhead that FFMPEG introduces. Plus, I don't really need to make a new rendered video file for every change in options when I'm trying to benchmark plugins.
Thankfully, there's a better way. The ever-awesome Groucho2004 has written a tool for this purpose called AVSMeter. It has pretty much everything that you would want in an AVISynth benchmarking tool, but it also serves as one of the best AVISynth diagnostic tools as well.
It has both a 32 and 64-bit option so you can compare between different versions of AVISynth, measurements of everything from memory usage to number of threads used. It has a function for checking your AVISynth installation to make sure that both the core program and all plugins are set up correctly. And of course, like any good benchmarking tool, it has comprehensive logging - including the ability to log to .csv files for you spreadsheet folks.
The included documentation does a really good job of explaining all the different features of AVSMeter, so I'm just going to post up a tutorial video about how to install and use it below and leave it at that.
BIG DISCLAIMER: This process may not work, may crash, or do other things to your system. Virus scanning all files is strongly encouraged, but not a 100% guarantee of safety.
You have been warned.
