Topic: Thumbnails for Video Clips (Read 3636 times)

Cmagic · « **on:** April 21, 2003, 11:17:19 pm »

Hello,

When cataloging Video clips, MC9 automatically generates a thumbnail from the video sequence. However it seems that MC9 takes the first frame or something which is a problem since the first frame is very often black or not meaningful.
I tried adding an image, just like for music, but it does not work.
Is there a way to choose the thumbnail that MC9 will use for video sequences ?
If not maybe this would be something to be added on MC10 wish list.

Thanks for any help or tips,

Christian

phelt · « **Reply #1 on:** April 22, 2003, 01:11:55 am »

I'm sorry that I don't have a solution, but I will commiserate with you. Many video-handling programs (cataloging, recording, even some editors) do exactly the same thing.

Worst case of this that I've seen so far was a DVD authoring package. Had a neat tool for building thumbnail scene menus, but would not let you define the image for the thumbnail... or let you make a DVD without those menus

It would be nice to have the option to manually define a thumbnail from an image file, or from a specific location in the video. Might also be nice to set the default time from which auto-thumbnails are generated - X seconds after the beginning of any given clip, for example.

Cmagic · « **Reply #2 on:** April 22, 2003, 02:24:31 am »

Yep,

I guess simply enabling the 'image file' property for video files in the exact same way as for audio files would be great.
There's a nice feature in Photoshop 7 that allows to select and extract a frame from a video file and save it as a jpeg or something. Yes, of course you need PS7 !

Well, we'll see (Black thumbnails for now!

) if this gets added in future MC releases.
It's, for sure, not a showstopper as MC9 gets ready for the big day.

thanks for the feedback

C.

Cmagic · « **Reply #3 on:** April 22, 2003, 11:42:17 pm »

Hi,

I finally made it manually replacing the automatic generated (black) thumbnails by frames I extracted from the movies with PS7. It's a bit tedious since the thumbnails have numerical names (e.g. 10234 (large)/jpg) but I think it is worth the effort.

(all thumbs are manually crafted except the Cardigans and Elvis costello -> MC auto generated)

Christian.

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #4 on:** April 23, 2003, 12:30:04 am »

Interested in doing that... how did you find out which thumbnail belonged to which film? I would guess if this could be extracted in some way through the SDK then a plugin could easily be written to do this...

I may even be able to write that one myself!!

Adam

Cmagic · « **Reply #5 on:** April 23, 2003, 12:56:07 am »

Hello NoCode,

Well I did it the simple way. I first erased all thumbnails in order to wipe out the thousands of audio 'cover arts' thumbnails. I then automatically recreated the tumbnails for my video files (about fifteen files) and ended up with mostly black thumbnails.
From there I explored the /thumbnails directory with WinXP explorer and tried to find out the correct files by looking at the y (height) size of thumbnails. I noticed that the x (width) size is fixed 128 pixels for (medium) and 256 pixels for (large) but the y size depends on the video cilp resolution. I must admit I was lucky because all my video files (except 3) had different sizes. Another thing is that I only have a few files, this would be quite impossible to do with a large collection. .
Once you have identified the correct thumbnails file name It's just a matter of using PS7 (or any other tool) to grab a frame and resize it to the 128 or 256 pixels width required for MC thumbnails.

have a nice day,

C.

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #6 on:** April 23, 2003, 01:17:54 am »

J River Guys,

Is there any way of finding out what thumbnail number MC has assigned to a particular file so that a plugin could be written to replace thumbnails with a particular frame taken from the movie??

Adam

Nikolay · « **Reply #7 on:** April 23, 2003, 05:27:09 am »

Cmagic,

I don't think it will be hard to implement the feature you've requested. We will try to add it the next build.

Adam,

When we fix image association you will be able to use Get/SetImageFile functions to change image.

Nikolay

Cmagic · « **Reply #8 on:** April 23, 2003, 05:36:22 am »

Quote

I don't think it will be hard to implement the feature you've requested. We will try to add it the next build.

JRiver folks ?

Ask them, it will be in the bext build !

Thanks very beaucoup Nikolay,

Christian

Listening to: 'I Feel Good' from 'More Greatest Hits' by 'Al Green' on Media Center 9.0

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #9 on:** April 23, 2003, 05:45:26 am »

Nice one. Thanks a lot nikolay. You guys really are the greatest!! And I thought there weren't going to be any more new features

Keep it up!!

Adam

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #10 on:** April 23, 2003, 03:31:53 pm »

C Magic...still not sure how you did this with PShop. Could you explain the process to me??

Cheers

Adam

Cmagic · « **Reply #11 on:** April 23, 2003, 09:30:01 pm »

Sure,

If you have PhotoShop 7 there's a tool to xtract a frame from a video file. Format supported are avi, wmv, mpg mpeg, asf and some others (works great with divx).
The tools is available in File/Import/Frame from video...

Once you picked a frame you like, resize it using Image/Image size..., apply any processing you like (increasing the contrast and saturation is good for small thumbnails) and save as a jpg file.

If you don't have PS7 I guess there are some shareware that can do the trick.

Cheers,

C.

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #12 on:** April 24, 2003, 04:45:36 am »

I have PS7 but couldn't find the option late last night. Cheers for the info!! I will check it out

Adam

V-Man · « **Reply #13 on:** April 24, 2003, 04:51:26 am »

It might also be good if by default MC chose a frame say 25% into the clip, rather than the first frame. Also in the media player window a context menu item "Thumbnail from current frame" which is only enabled when the video is paused.

sraymond · « **Reply #14 on:** April 24, 2003, 09:10:40 am »

I wonder if it wouldn't be more elegant to just "fix" your videos by adding a new first frame - rather than having to export a frame and manage the files by hand.

I keep telling myself I'll do this one of these days, but as my son is learning to read, I think I'm doing him a favor by making him work for his cartoons!

Scott-

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #15 on:** April 24, 2003, 10:55:25 am »

I just looked and my Photoshop 7 doesn't have that option

Is it defnitely PS and not Image Ready as I didn't install that...

Adam

Cmagic · « **Reply #16 on:** April 24, 2003, 11:57:38 am »

Ooops, you're right it's not in the original PS7 distribution. In fact it's a plugin, a Photoshop Element 2.0 plugin !
I have both and I copied the plugins from PSE2 directory to PS7 plugin directory as PSE2 has some nice features PS7 does not have (pdf sildeshow and... video frame grabber).

Sorry,

C.

JohnT · « **Reply #17 on:** April 25, 2003, 06:01:36 am »

Try the next build. It has an option (if you're running XP) to do a frame grab on a paused video and make the thumbnails from it. The option appears on the pop-up menu when the video is paused.

- John T.

Cmagic · « **Reply #18 on:** April 25, 2003, 07:10:53 am »

Nice one John,

Thanks a lot to the JRiver dev team for this new feature.

Christian

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #19 on:** April 25, 2003, 10:51:24 am »

You guys really are the greatest!! WHere do I send the beers to? Can I email them like I do to King Sparta? Scanned?

Adam

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Author Topic: Thumbnails for Video Clips (Read 3636 times)

phelt

V-Man

sraymond