Scene Detection and Minimum Clip Length?

Frank Z wrote on 11/18/2007, 8:53 PM

Okay, it seems that this minimum clip length value doesn't work the way you'd think it would work. I set it to be a minute and it appears that any clip under a minute is excluded from the capture rather than bound to the subsequent clips to make them over a minute. Is that the way it's supposed to be? Seems strange not to at least make that optionable...

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 11/18/2007, 9:07 PM

I thought the idea of this feature was to save having to deal with the capture of short bits where the camera was started accidentally then stopped again - normally a setting of say 2 or 3 sec would avoid these. There could easily be "proper" takes of a minute or less so setting it there could exclude useful material.

Grazie wrote on 11/18/2007, 10:38 PM

Ditto Peter.

Frank, having read your post twice now, I am gathering that what you are saying is that you think that any clip UNDER 1 minute not only should NOT be ignored but should be ADDED to one bigger. Now that's a very interesting way in interpreting the feature. But, as you have found out, that is NOT the case. Now, supposing that you had had 20 less than one minute duration clips? Are you saying that in this example they would ALL be run together? I can understand that. I really can. So, is your spin on this feature something along the lines of if Vegas had the ability it would NOT separate less than one minute clips out, but would rather "knit" them together for you, into something BIGGER? If so I can understand that as well. And if THIS is your understanding and you don't WANT to have separate clips, then you CAN also do this. But this is not done through the minimum clip length.

Grazie

Frank Z wrote on 11/21/2007, 12:29 PM

Right. That's the way I read it because there are actually other scene detect software products that do it the other way. In the context of working with the capture with minimum clip length turned off, I understand why it works the way it does. I hadn't considered the accidental turn on turn off situation because believe it or not, I rarely have them on my tapes. But working with my friend's tape I see it. But the benefit of having manageable clips I guess outweighs that preference. I just turn it off and delete offending clips because I'm too much of a control freak.

Chienworks wrote on 11/21/2007, 12:55 PM

I think having it combine shorter clips into one longer clip would be a bit difficult to do well. For one thing, the software would have to read the whole tape first to identify which clips are shorter, then go back and capture. There's no way to know when the tape moves from one clip to the next how long the next one will be without reading the whole clip.

I'm also not sure of how useful it would be. If i want my scenes captured as separate clips then i want all of them separate, not just some, and certainly not decided by the machine. Any separate clips that i want to use together can be used together easily even if they are separate files. If i want the clips joined together then i can capture as one long single clip.

I always have scene detect turned on, and i always have the minimum clip length set to 1 second. It avoids all the little files that often come at the beginning and end of scenes, especially if the camera is turned off or the tape is rewound to review what's been shot before recording more.