In addition to the other comments:

1) If you want automatic scene detection within a single avi file, that isn't possible (to my knowledge) in Movie Studio. You'd have to do this at capture time; of course the result would be a series of separate source files.

2) Upside down? You have to tell us how that happened! No way to flip the thumbnail on the timeline. You'd have to re-render, having used pan/crop to flip it as you described.

3) Not sure what you mean by "clipboard". If you mean the contents of the media pool, then yes. If you mean something that you've copied (say, using Ctrl-C) then I think this may work if you have a separate instance of Movie Studio open. Give it a try; I seem to recall people having mixed luck with this kind of thing. Worst case just use the explorer tab to find the item on your hard drive.

Thanks for the replies. The background to my questions comes from the fact that I will be converting movies ( film) to DVD by on the fly video recording of the filmgate of a projector using add on macro lenses on my GS400. These films will then be edited to DVD but from the same material various different DVDs will be made to suit different people. Therefore, there must be an easy way to find the different scenes from these large avi files. The images are recorded not only upside down but reversed and have to be flipped both vertically and horizontally. I was hoping that splitting a scene on the timeline and copying it to the clipboard I could then paste it into other windows folders or .vf files but apparently this cannot be done. I now see that Movie Studio (MS) has two major deficiencies for the type of work I plan to do: No scene detection, no ability to reduce avi files to individual scenes. Although MS could collect the material by splitting and deleting, this is way too labor intensive and slow. The effort needed just to find the end frames of one scene for deletion is way too difficult when I have many thousands of scenes to deal with. Obviously I need additional software that does scene detection and separation of scenes during capture. Having said this, I can use MS for my work for the actual composing and DVD production.

Raimunde,

If you add one step you'll then be able to use scene detection. That is to first copy the DVD onto DV, then import.

As of yet all of the scene detections programs I've seen ALL use DV.

Of course there is always the option of playing 'Assistant Editor' and slicing the video into the sections you want and creating a catalog for quick retrieval. It may sound like a lot of work, but it will more than make up for time invested in doing it.

The scene detection for DV is based on the time/date stamp changes. IF you do not stop the camera, there are no changes, thus no scene detection.

Dave T2

There are some products out there (Scenalyzer comes to mind) that at least claim to do scene detecton based on the video stream itself. I've never tried it myself, so maybe someone can comment.

Scenalyzer has a trial program (watermarks the image). It's worth trying out if for no other reason than to eliminate it as a possible solution.

I've used the program and found it dependable. With that said, my preference is Vegas Studio.

For the purpose of capturing old movies or analog video tape and breaking into scenes, Scenalyzer is the way to go. It does optical scene detection and works when capturing directly from a DV camcorder.

The current beta version, ScenalyzerLive 4 (which is in my experience stable) can also do optical scene detection on an existing DV-AVI (*.avi) file. Another good feature in the beta is the ability to join scenes together if the were improperly split, which can happen whenever someone walks close in front of the camera.

The interface is not the most intuitive, but I think you would be very happy with it.

Dave wrote:

"The scene detection for DV is based on the time/date stamp changes."

Scenalyzer DOES work with scene change regardless of time change. First, it first does a high speed scan of the tape, rewinds tape, then captures tape with scene detection based on images.

If memory serves me correctly after the high speed scan you can select scenes to capture. The tape will skip those that are not checked.

Of course it will also do time/date stamp as well as predetermined time periods (i.e. every 8 minutes).