i found this in the Decomb 3.8 readme by Donald Graft:
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Don't Invoke an Avisynth Strangeness This one is very important and can easily cost you a 25% speed penalty! It appears that Avisynth has a strangeness that causes it to waste enormous amounts of time when there are no parentheses with the commands. For example, this script:
Telecide
Decimate
...will run much slower than this one:
Telecide()
Decimate()
If you doubt this, try it both ways and see. It is critical, therefore, to always include at least one parameter or the set of empty parentheses. That is why the scenarios below all are coded that way.
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hey DeltaBoy, I don't know if this applies to all avisynth filters- maybe it should be like this: Bob()
It seems stupid but it might save a little time