Automatically Removing "duplicate" or "dead" frames

Question

Automatically Removing "duplicate" or "dead" frames

I have some video that has frames where no video movement is occurring and there is no audio. Think of captured streaming media that is buffering so has no movement or audio.

Is there some way to strip down the source video to automatically remove these "dead" frames. I could think that judging frames with 0% audio would be a good indication of these dead frames, but is there some way to run the video through some tool or apply some filter in Final Cut?

Thanks,
Brian

Macbook 2.4 Intel Core2 Duo / 2GB, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 28, 2008 10:37 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 28, 2008 12:46 PM in response to rocketmanblamb

I'm pretty sure it can't be done.

In all my years of editing I have never heard of anyone with your problem.

Reply

Answer 2

Nov 30, 2008 9:26 AM in response to rocketmanblamb

Or think about security camera video that doesn't activate on motion but records everything, a lot of that would be so-called 'dead' frames.

Same situation for video from a webcam, potentially lots of uninteresting 'dead' frames possibly hiding the interesting moments.

I'm willing to programatically create a solution with Automator, AppleScript or some other scripting solution(e.g. Python), just seeing if anyone had any idea of tools that might help identify either the change in video/audio to mark points for cuts or some other thoughts.

I'm thinking either to identify just based on frame(s) that have no audio (maybe have some threshold for minimum number of these frames), or if there is a way to judge that video data has changed over time that would be interesting too.

So, the trick just seems to be getting this kind of information out of the file by automatic inspection (as opposed to manually reviewing and marking.)

Any thoughts?

Reply

Answer 3

Studio X

Level 7

27,229 points

Nov 30, 2008 10:56 AM in response to rocketmanblamb

(as opposed to manually reviewing and marking.)

This is called editing. It's what editors do with an video editing program.

What you really want is a motion activated video capture system.

x

Reply