Scenalyzer Live!

The capacity of hard drives these days is becoming bigger and bigger. This means that you can store quite a lot of footage of high quality footage for your editing project. Nevertheless, batch capturing is still a great way of organizing your work. Scenalyzer Live! is a utility that takes batch capturing to the ultimate level. Furthermore it is useful to create an archive of all your video tapes in a limited amount of space.

Special Note

This review was performed while the 4.0 version was still a Beta release. While testing we found some minor flaws, but we will assume that this will be resolved before an official version will be released. We worked with the official released version 2.1 and this worked without any problems. Version 4.0 offers quite a number of extra features.

1. Installation and running

Installation is straightforward. The only thing that happens is that an executable is placed in a folder of your choice and some entries are placed in the registry. There is no uninstall program; you must uninstall through the Windows Control Panel. A quite peculiar issue of the program is you that will not only get a security warning form Windows XP when you install it (meaning that it does not carry an approved digital signature), the warning actually pops-up every time you run the program unless you tell Windows that this program is to be trusted.

2. The Interface

At first, the interface is not very intuitive and the program is lacking a manual. So when you first use it, you will end up looking around a bit how to do things. Pay attention to the area in the lower left corner of the main Window. This is where you see tips what you can do at the current stage of the process. It will also display possible errors or warnings. Furthermore, help is provided through a tool tip system.

Above that section there is the Device Control area for you camcorder containing Play (normal speed and fast) Backward (normal speed and fast), Pause, Stop, Fast Forward, Rewind and Step frame by Frame. This are can also be used to record back to tape, using Record buttons. Scenalyzer live! only works with digital camcorders. It does not recognize analog capture cards installed on your system so you can not capture directly from analog camcorders. We did not test, but according to the developer it should recognize the Pinnacle DV500 and Pro-One and Canopus Storm cards.

The top left corner is a preview window to display video and the right hand side is the area where eventually the captured files will become visible.

3. Indexing a tape

The most powerful feature of Scenalyzer is the ability to quickly create and index of a tape. The program can scan the tape at various speeds depending on the capabilities of the camcorder (usually 1x, 2x and 12x). While doing so, it will create a so called index containing information about scenes found on the tape. Scene recognition is based on either the time code on the tape or on optical 'jumps'. You can select if the program just creates an index which will then be a file with the extension SCL. This file will contain a listing of scenes including up to 9 thumbnails (the first frame a number frames in between) per scene. This file is visualized in Scenalyzer by a number of strips containing the thumbnails. Great feature is that you can even print it. This way you can create a visual index of your tape library. You can also tell the program to create a low resolution movie of the tape while indexing. In this case, the result of the indexing process is an AVI file with a frame size of 180x144 and an MJPEG compression, which also contains the index itself. You can actually play the AVI file in a normal player, but if you load the file in Scenalyzer you will see the individual scenes that were detected.

4. Batch capturing

Once you have created an index of a tape, or part of a tape, you can edit the index in all kind of different ways: manually splitting and joining scenes, trimming them, deleting scenes from the index etc. But the most logical thing to do is to select the scenes for batch capturing. After you have selected all the clips that you want to include in your batch capturing. Next it is simply a matter of hitting a button and Scenalyzer will automatically go through the tape and capture all the selected scenes. According to the web site of the developer, the batch capturing process is not fooled by time code interruptions on the tape and the process is coded in a smart way to prevent as much as possible unnecessary start/stop/wind sequences to avoid unnecessary wear of the camera. Furthermore, It can capture both Type-1 and Type-2 DV-AVI files.

5. Special features

Besides video, the program can also capture individual frames stills. Export formats are .bmp and .jpg. To avoid interlacing effects in stills, the Scenalyzer dan de-interlace when capturing stills.

What makes the program very interesting and much different from video editing programs with automatic scene detection capturing is that the result of indexing process is stored in a separate file. At any time in the future, you can simply place the tape in your camcorder, connect to your PC, load the file in Scenalyzer and you are ready to batch capture the tape again. The index can even be exported in a variety of formats. Apart from two types of txt files it can generate:

• HTML: this will output a HTML-file with a table containing thumbnails and written information like source name, time codes and video and audio parameters. This way you can directly put the index on the internet for online viewing.
• EDL: this is a so called Edit Decision List. It is a format used by professional video editors telling them what scenes to use in an edit.