joan

Thanks This is what I try to do with the user's manual (especially the tutorials section). (online copy here) So how to improve it ? Is it too complicated, doesn't countain enough info or too much, not focused enough on the really basic stuff ? A printable format would help ? I'm not sure there is a best format… If you need to step back one frame at a time on large videos, some encoding profiles works better than other though. In these cases it's best to have "intra only" type of encoding, like in DV or MJPEG compression, as opposed to strong time compressed encoding (where to display a particular frame we need to first decode a number of the preceeding ones.) (This is not relevant for short clips where the frames are extracted to memory anyway.) Also, HD videos with higher framerate (say 60fps) can be hard to be displayed in real time. Yes, thank you very much

Hi, I am developping a piece of software called Kinovea. It's goal is to ease the study of videos. It's mainly used for sports. (I'm spawning a new thread not to interfere with the "Alternative to Dartfish" one. Kinovea commitment is not to be a Dartfish alternative anyway.) It is Open Source and (so far) Windows only. I'm always on the look out for feedback so please do not hesitate to speak your mind. I'm especially interested in ways that the usability could be improved (it's a top priority), bugs, annoyances, etc. Then, of course, what features are felt missing the most and how existing one could be improved. The primary audience was the coaches and athletes, but I've heard about several sport teachers using it. (At least one of them thought it was easy enough that she made her students use it to create their own content during the course.) I've also received feedback about a 3D teacher, using Kinovea to comment the students works directly on the video of their work. (using drawings to underline mistakes etc.) So, if you've tried it and didn't like it, I want to know why, if you've found defects, I want to know about them, If you've suggestions write them out Thanks

Great news Yes, the tracking can be lost a bit too easily. I've started to look into more advanced algorithms for it, since they will be needed for future functions anyway. However I don't know when exactly I will be able to start working on this, as the todo-list is growing and priorities need to be defined. And yes, the algo I'm considering are scale and rotation invariant. I expect them to slow things down, but robustness is probably more important. Thanks for the feedback. I guess this is starting to be a bit off topic… I think I'll start a new topic not to pollute this one.

There is a semi-automated tracking function. You first add a drawing of type "cross", then right-click it and choose "Track Trajectory" in the contextual menu. Then, when you move forward in the video, it will try its best to macth the object and will draw the trajectory. If you aren't satisfied with what it came up with, you can adjust it manually at any time. (The tracking is somewhat easily lost, as the tracked object passes behind something or change shape, etc.) I you can reach blip.tv, there is a quick demo of it at the end of this video. Edit: Ok, a range of french IP from the web host were blacklisted by the chinese Great Firewall. I changed the geolocalisation of the site to england, and it should be reachable from China within the next few days

Hi, I also noticed that the website cannot be accessed from China, it's pretty inconvenient. Unfortunately there not much I can do. I will send you the latest stable release (0.7.10). Just so you know, there is also an experimental version (0.8.1) with new features (and new bugs) if you aren't afraid Edit: Wait a minute, it's 9MB, I can't send this through mail… Hmm, I will try to mirror it somewhere else.

Hi, Please have a look at Kinovea, it's an open source solution that may suits your needs. It doesn't have an equivalent for all the Dartfish functions (yet) but the 0.7.2 version that was released just a few days ago does Key Images comments and drawings, saving selection back to video, batch snapshots, etc. screenshot It's free to use and copy. You're welcome to give feedback and suggestions. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of Kinovea)