Add option to extract evenly distributed thumbnails from movie

[hluxem]

I think it would be nice to add an option to extract evenly distributed thumbnails from movie clips. Taking thumbnails in relation to the clip length would work better for me than have them a fixed time apart. I have a mix of short scenes from some seconds to several minutes with longer movies spanning multiple scenes. For the shorter scenes the thumbnail is enough for me to know what the video is about. Having multiple thumbnails for longer movies would help me to see what the movie is about, it would capture the beginning, several scenes in the middle and the end. I would use the same offset in the beginning and the end and then split evenly.

This was discussed in this thread:

https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=8298.msg58389#msg58389

Thanks,

Heiner

[Jingo]

Interesting...  instead of fixed thumbnails though, why not just allow for an animated gif that shows the thumbnails?  Or - perhaps the ability to just start playing the movie in the thumbnail at an accelerated rate?  Just thinking out loud....

[Mario]

IMatch already renders an animated preview for movies.

The user controls how many frames IMatch extracts from the video and at which intervals (see https://www.photools.com/help/imatch/#fw_basics.htm?dl=h-18).
The idea is to make it easier and quicker to judge if the right video is selected (in the File Window) by showing animated sequence of the the first n seconds.
For that purpose, thumbnails taken from the middle or end of the video don't add additional benefit. I think most users just let IMatch generate the default thumbnails which is 5 frames at two-second intervals.

Creating n thumbnails at regular intervals would require more work because IMatch does not know the duration of the video at the time the thumbnails are generated. IMatch would have to run the external ffmpeg utility two times, first to determine the runtime, then calculate the intervals and then run it again to extract thumbnails from the given intervals. Or maybe ffmpeg has options for that, it has many.

But this would complicate things in that phase and require more code. Hence I asked the OP to make this a FR so I can see if this is of interest for more than a few users.

[Jingo]

IMatch already renders an animated preview for movies.

The user controls how many frames IMatch extracts from the video and at which intervals (see https://www.photools.com/help/imatch/#fw_basics.htm?dl=h-18).
The idea is to make it easier and quicker to judge if the right video is selected (in the File Window) by showing animated sequence of the the first n seconds.
For that purpose, thumbnails taken from the middle or end of the video don't add additional benefit. I think must users just let IMatch generate the default thumbnails which is 5 frames at two-second intervals.

Creating n thumbnails and regular intervals would require more work because IMatch does not know the duration of the video at the time the thumbnails are generated. IMatch would have to run the external ffmpeg utility two times, first to determine the runtime, then calculate the internals and then run it again to extract thumbnails from the given intervals. Or maybe ffmpeg has options for that, it has many.

But this would complicate things in that phase and require more code. Hence I asked the OP to make this a FR so I can see if this is of interest for more than a few users.

See.. IM already does it..    I just don't include movies in my database so I had no idea... 

[Mario]

See.. IM already does it..    I just don't include movies in my database so I had no idea... 

IMatch does many things many users don't know about. It all depends on what you need, your workflow, the file formats you're dealing with, if you take the time to look over the feature lists in the help and so on.

For example, the improvement for PDF thumbnail / preview processing scheduled for the next release may be irrelevant for many users who only manage image files in IMatch.
But it will be a massive enhancement for people managing with PDF files.