Video Indexing Capability

[colorchange4]

As the still and video worlds continue to merge, adding enhanced video capabilities is crucial. Right now, if you don't have the file online, you get only one thumbnail. This is not acceptable for video. If you added the exact same capabilities of an older DV only program Scenalyzer (but with HDV capabilities) to 5 , this would simply be awesome. It is the biggest glaring weakness of 5 IMO at the moment. The program rocks but this is a giant business opportunity. Even though the long term tape storage driver will fade, many people have older hard drives with loads of video clips (and stills often - which you handle beautifully) that they would like to keep track of. I think it is a huge potential competitive edge you could capitalize on. From an economic standpoint, you save someone $200 for a hard drive by allowing them to leave the clips on tape but you have a good idea what's on them and know exactly where they are. You can use another program to capture them if you don't want to go that far.

For those who don't know, Scenalyzer used to connect to your video camera and take the clips and grab a series of thumbnails from each clip so that you would have an idea what was going on in each clop, and obviously where what tape it came from. It was simply fantastic but the author wasn't willing to update it to HDV. Having only one thumbnail for videos isn't descriptive/informative enough in too many situations if the video happens to be offline. What I'm imagining is the first frame is a regular thumbnail just like a picture, but then you have the option of expanding to a series of stills spanning the clip, just like Scenalyzer.

Please ask me if you have any questions. This way you can store the files in tape form, off line, but have a good idea what clips you have and where they are. If you would like, I could continue to pursue this with potential strategic partner if you're interested. Let me know.

[Mario]

If no WIC codec is installed for your video format, IMatch uses services provided by Windows to extract a preview from the file. IMatch can cache previews from video files in the same way it can cache previews for all formats. You can thus look  at the files also when they are off-line.

If IMatch can only extract a thumbnail for your video files, the problem is most likely that Windows itself does not know how to handle the file. Quite common, especially with Apple formats like QuickTime or MP4.

But video is a real mess. It is a patent and license minefield. Even accessing the wrong sections of a video file from an application like IMatch can violate a patent or some other MPEG group rule and cause a lot of headache.

Potential alternatives would be to use (and require my users to install) QuickTime for one half of the video formats in use today, and then something like VLC to handle other formats. Or VLC first, then QuickTime as a fallback.

The problem is that I'm still reading the 200+ pages license agreements, conditions of use, terms of service and "when you are allowed to use this technology in your application and how much it will cost you per user". This may not be a problem for companies like Apple, Microsoft or Adobe which have 500+ employees in their law and license departments. But for a person developing a software like IMatch in his spare time it can be risky to overlook even one of the rules.

This is why I currently rely on installed WIC codecs and the intrinsic support in Windows to render thumbnails and previews for video files. It's the legally save method.

ExifTool handles reading and writing metadata from/to many video formats already so IMatch supports that too.

You can always create a JPEG file (or other format) of exactly the frame you are interested in in your video editing application and make it a version proxy for the video file. This allows you to see full-site frames, the thumbnail will look the same etc. Quite an elegant method. I have seen users creating an animated GIF file from a video, showing the first couple of seconds. IMatch can use that as a proxy as well, and even play the GIF animation in the App Panel via the GIF app...

I will surely look into improving the video support in the releases following the initial release. I have some preliminary code sitting here, waiting for some free time...

[colorchange4]

Thanks Mario. Hope you can add it later.

[Mario]

Luckily IMatch supports (at least for thumbnails and small previews) many video formats already. Organizing the files and working with Metadata works 100% (metadata if ExifTool support it, which it does for all relevant video formats).

Larger previews with the ability to pick the frame to use, a more reliable preview for video files (maybe even in the viewer) etc. is on my to-do list. The wedding photographers are all up my back for this because video is now over 50% of their business. And normal photographers also provide video footage these days.

It's just that video is not only a technological problem but also a legal problem. Licenses which allow open source software like VLC to play a video format may not be applicable for a shareware like IMatch - because it is considered as commercial. And then I suddenly face problems to report every IMatch unit sold to whatever company is holding the patents for certain video formats and to pay royalties for every user...

[Ferdinand]

The wedding photographers are all up my back for this because video is now over 50% of their business. And normal photographers also provide video footage these days.

Are you saying that wedding photographers are not normal?   

[Mario]

They are sometimes even more than normal. While normal photographer sometimes behave like wedding photographers. And don't ask me about PJ's...