Dates

• Due: April 18, 2012

Group Size

This lab can be done in pairs -- but both partners must fully participate in all aspects of the lab

The Assignment

In class, we discussed how storyboarding videos makes them much faster to process by humans. We discussed some rudimentary techniques for producing storyboards, e.g. period frame grabs and re-encoding to do key frame grams. We also discussed how adversaries can get past these rudimentary techniques -- and more advanced techniques that can be used.

In class, I demoed my one hour quick-hack storyboarding script. It made use of the following:

• ffmpeg to re-encode videos to reduce the unnecessary keyframes that are often added to allow for seeking, e.g. "ffmpeg -g 600 -sc_threshold 40 -i input.mpeg tmpvideo.mpeg"
• mplay to grab key frames, e.g "mplayer -vo jpeg:outdir=frames -vf framestep=I -frames 100 tmpvideo.mpeg"
• ps2ps, psnup, and ps2pdf to generate a printable storyboard (acknowledging that, when I've done this, I often rely on the Windows or Linux GUI to thumbnail for me and let me scroll)

Your job is to build a tool substantially better than the one I built and demoed. Yes, that is open ended. But, that's okay. Give it your best in the time available.

I suggested doing things with the frame timestamps I ignored, making use of ssdeep or some other fuzzy hash technique, coding up a legitimate scene change detection algorithm, building a fast, friendly browsing viewer for the thumbnails, sorting videos automatically in some way, and/or automating the creation of thumbnails across multiple images, as possible areas to explore individually or in coordination with each other, e.g. sort videos by quality, and organize the thumbnails in corresponding directories).

Deliverables

• Your tool
• Your tool's source, if not scripted or otherwise interpreted
• A link to at least one example video on the Web (perhaps your Web page)
• The storyboard for the video mentioned above
• A report describing your tool, how to use it, and anything of interest from the development, e.g. things you larned, challenges you faced, or things that suprised you by catching on fire (and then putting themselves out).

I'm Here to Help!

...Please let me know how I can be of service.