Digital Video Analysis

I’m beginning to work through data collected over the past couple pf weeks using audio and screen capture information procured via Camtasia.  I’m converting these files to .AVI and then testing the following open-source packages – vDub for editing down to the most relevant material and Transana for coding.  On April 13th I’m hoping to attend a session on ‘Observer’ another video analysis tool – I’ll report back if anything useful arises…

Virtual Dub http://virtualdub.org/ (open-source)

Virtual Dub is an open-source software that allows quick video editing, joining, conversion, and recompression with AVI files.  As such vDub is a powerful tool for streamlined for fast linear operations over video.

Transana: http://www.transana.org/ (open-source)

Transana an open source (free) software developed at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research to help researchers analyse digital video or audio data. Transana allows the researcher to:

• Identify and easily access the analytically significant portions of their video data.
• Transcribe film and audio recordings in a user friendly way.
• Manage large video collections containing hundreds (and potentially thousands) of hours of video.
• Organize video clips (from the same or from different video files) into meaningful categories, as a mechanism for developing and expanding the theoretical understanding of what the video shows.
• Apply searchable analytic keywords to these video clips.
• Engage in complex data mining and hypothesis testing across large video collections.
• Share analytic markup with distant colleagues to facilitate collaborative analysis.

Transana runs on Windowsin both single-user and multi-user versions. Macintosh versions are in Alpha-Test release.