Shot validation issues

[cinematicity]

After detecting shots for a film, I want to use the "Shot validation view" to go through and fix up the problems with shot boundaries. They are often off by one, which means there are many duplicate images when I eventually generate a summary of the entire film.

I select "Adjust annotation bounds" and the Shot validation view opens. I wait for it to slowly refresh all of the thumbnails, but often it never seems to finish. Several of the thumbnails are just grey squares with a clock icon. Even if I click "Refresh snapshots", they don't refresh. As I click through from cut to cut, I see the same thing for each cut: 3 or 4 of the thumbnails do not display. So, I can't see where to place the cut.

According to the green icon in the lower right-hand corner of the Advene window, there is no snapshot activity while I am waiting. It does a little bit when I click the Refresh button, but most of the thumbnails don't ever refresh. If I try double-clicking on an annotation in the Timeline view, I get an edit window, but it's the same problem: the thumbnails are often grey.

I have tried "Reset ImageCache" and "Update annotation screenshots" but it doesn't seem to help.

Any suggestions?

[cinematicity]

Bump

[oaubert]

What video format (more precisely container: .avi, .mov, mpg...) are you using ? Some formats are notoriously bad at random seeking. Since the thumbnailer code basically seeks into the movie for every requested snapshot, some formats (like mpeg) can be from hard to impossible to correctly thumbnail. Indexed containers such as .avi, .mkv or recent ogg are much better in this respect.

[cinematicity]

I'm using an m4v file. The video codec is H.264.

I would like to just read directly from a DVD but that functionality seems completely broken in Advene.

[oaubert]

m4v container should be fine. Would it be possible to send me the video (or a piece of it) so that I can investigate?

The DVD support was the first target of Advene, some years ago. And it is true that it has not been tested recently. However, I can testify from first-hand experience that DVD is not appropriate for interactive/intensive navigation: I (physically) broke a DVD player when doing experiments.
I will however have a look again at DVD support on Mac/Windows.

[cinematicity]

Sure. Here's a short excerpt of the video (12.4 MB):

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2ixoxx

The full video file is 400 MB. When I cut it down using QuickTime and saved, it converted to a mov file (I don't see an option to save as m4v). I tried this in Advene and I see the same problem: it cannot render thumbnails in the shot validation view (I'm trying this on OS X).

If there is a problem with Advene and mov, I can either send the entire m4v file or else please let me know an OS X app that can be used to cut the m4v file into a shorter segment.

[cinematicity]

Follow-up: I tried ripping the DVD again to an m4v file using an MPEG-4 codec instead of H.264. Then, I ran it through Advene. With this combination, the thumbnails render correctly. So, could there be a problem extracting thumbnails consistently from H.264-encoded video?

[oaubert]

Well, strictly speaking, H.264 is part of the MPEG-4 spec (more specifically MPEG-4 part 10). That said, it is more recent, and support in gstreamer may not be as complete as for more ancient ones. On top of this, the gstreamer version is a little bit older for the MacOS X installer, which may explain some troubles too.

So basically, we are depending on gstreamer progress for this issue. Nice to know that you have found a workaround though.