Making movie clips for E-Prime?
David McFarlane
advice. I first checked in the New Features Guide, and did a cursory
search through the PST Knowledge Base, the PST Forum, and the E-Prime
Google Group, and did not find this addressed anywhere, so I hope I
have done my homework at least as well as I expect others to :).
Two related questions:
1) Suppose we want to make some short clips from a larger, existing
movie file for use in E-Prime. What software would you recommend for this?
2) Suppose we want to record our own movie clips from scratch for use
in E-Prime. What systems would you recommend for that?
I might also reframe those questions as, "What did *you* use?" or,
"What worked for *you*?"
Note that the KB and online discussions have addressed at length how
to get *existing* clips to work with E-Prime (installing codec
libraries, etc.). I instead want to avoid those problems by
preparing our clips in the first place in a way that plays well with
E-Prime "out-of-the-box". Any advice?
Thanks,
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
David McFarlane
First general-purpose answer I got was Windows Movie Maker, which
already comes with recent versions of MS Windows. Have any of you
found success with that?
A more serious source recommends Final Cut Pro (or perhaps the less
expensive Final Cut Express). Anyone have any experience with
that? It will render in a host of codecs, so it should do a good job
of rendering clips for E-Prime. But it is a Mac-only product.
So I looked for Windows alternatives to FCP, and came up with Adobe
Premiere, or Sony Vegas. Can anybody tell me something about these products?
Thanks again,
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
Michiel Spape
Noticed you answered your own questions mostly, but I'd like to draw your attention to Virtualdubmod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/) anyway - if I remember correctly from some time ago when I was dabbling in video stuff, you can do most useful things for lab purposes: re-encode, strip audio, save audio, save bits of film, and save to bmp. Personally, I'm pretty fond of saving films to bmp, so that you don't need e-prime 2 :)
As for recording: for simple stuff windows movie maker works fine, more heavy stuff might be better done with commercial packages (depending on your budget).
Best,
Mich
Michiel Spapé
Research Fellow
Perception & Action group
University of Nottingham
School of Psychology
www.cognitology.eu
Two related questions:
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David McFarlane
Thanks. As it turns out, VirtualDubMod has been
discontinued since about 2006. But if we just
shorten that to "VirtualDub", we get to the
current product (http://www.virtualdub.org
). And it also turns out that David Vinson
recommended the same product at
http://groups.google.com/group/e-prime/browse_thread/thread/8a3086f95f315fc5
. It does seem to be an extensive video editing package, could be handy.
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
David McFarlane
else can use this. I would be very interested if others could weigh
in with what they have used.
First, turns out my user really wanted to extract short clips (~1
min) from commercial movie DVDs. In short, I managed to use AoA DVD
Ripper (http://www.aoamedia.com/dvd_ripper.htm ) to visually select a
segment to clip from a commercial DVD, set DVD Ripper to encode it as
MPEG-1/VCD (*.mpg), and the resulting file played in stock E-Prime
with no further fuss. (That will work fine as long as the DVDs that
the user wants do not foil us with some futher copy protection, and
assuming that our use falls within Fair Use.)
More details for those who care...
In general, we have two strategies we might apply here -- configure
E-Prime to work with movie files as we supply them, or make sure that
the movie files we supply are configured to work with stock
E-Prime. I prefer the latter strategy, because (1) I figure that
the E-Prime developers have optimized E-Prime for a limited range of
formats even if we can trick it up to accept other formats, and (2)
I would rather not have to reconfigure E-Prime with custom codecs
every time we move the experiment to a new machine.
So first I used GSpot (http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ ) and
MediaInfo (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en )to see what
format/codec E-Prime uses for its own examples. They use .mpg files,
encoded as MPEG Video (Version 1). So I set that as my goal.
I tried two products for ripping the DVD samples. First I tried
HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr ), but (1) the interface does not
seem to have a good visual way to select arbitrary clips, (2) it was
*very* slow (we canceled before it finished), and (3) HandBrake
itself insists that it is only a transcoder, *not* a DVD ripper.
After Googling around a bit I moved on to AoA DVD Ripper. This
provides a good-enough visual interface for selecting arbitrary
clips, worked pretty fast, and produced an .avi file that played in
Media Player. That file did not play in stock E-Prime, however, but
once I reconfigured DVD Ripper to output MPEG-1 all was well. (I
also set File Split Mode to Infinite just to avoid splitting
files.) Note that by default DVD Ripper outputs .avi at 720x480
resolution, or .mpg at 352x240 resolution, so you might want to
fiddle with that further. (It costs US$40 (cheap!) to register DVD
Ripper, and I do not know how the paid version differs from the free
one, but if you find the program useful then please do the right
thing and pay for it.)
Now as it turns out, when I installed AoA DVD Ripper it also
installed an Xvid codec, so then the .avi file played in E-Prime as
well. But the .mpg file continued to play in E-Prime even after I
uninstalled the Xvid codec, so I feel safer sticking with .mpg (MPEG-1).
For the record, if we did want to fiddle with codecs for E-Prime, in
addition to letting AoA DVD Ripper install Xvid, PST recommends the
ffdshow (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/ffdshow.htm ) and SUPER
(http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html ) codec libraries (see
http://support.pstnet.com/forum/Topic635-12-1.aspx and
http://www.pstnet.com/forum/Topic2986-5-1.aspx ).
Finally, as mentioned earlier in this thread, for more extensive
video editing VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org ) might come into
play. This outputs only in .avi format, so would require installing
codecs for E-Prime, or using A0A DVD Ripper or HandBrake to transcode
the output files as needed for use in E-Prime.
I still have no idea what system to use in case we ever want to
generate video for E-Prime from scratch, but I guess we will cross
that bridge when we come to it.
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
David Vinson
I work with videos a lot and there are all kinds of possible pitfalls,
so I thought I'd weigh in on a few of the issues while the topic is
fresh in my mind. It's incredibly important to develop dependable and
consistent systems of creating stimuli that work for your hardware and
software.
I very much agree with David's option: that wherever possible it's best
to create video files with stock E-Prime in mind, rather than trying to
coerce E-Prime into working with whatever video files you have. With the
latter you may experience weeks of trouble (and repeated back-and-forth
correspondence with E-Prime Support who may or may not be able to
replicate your video problems on their hardware!). The Codec Config tool
is very useful in dealing with various video formats but it only goes so
far - and files that pass the codec config test may still cause crashes
when run for real.
Our test procedure when developing video experiments is something like
this. At each step there's a chance for failure (but less if you follow
the same steps as in a previous successful study)!
(Our experiments: we are mostly using clips of sign language stimuli 1-2
seconds long, perhaps 150-200 per experiment, possibly repeated a few
times in the course of a study).
1 - convert the very first video clip into the desired format/size etc.
(we prefer to display videos at their actual size rather than using
E-Prime's stretch function), and run Codec Config to see if the clip
passes this simple test.
2 - create the simplest possible program that displays that one video
using a MovieDisplay. If it works proceed to the next step.
3 - convert some more clips (15-20 should suffice, or just do them all
in batch mode). While you (or someone else) proceeds with the editing
process, set up a "stress test" experiment that repeatedly displays
these clips, one after another, with a reasonable interval between each
(otherwise you may start getting build-up of loading lags and thoroughly
unpleasant performance)
Make sure this experiment logs data (even if it's just non-responses).
I might set it to 100 repetitions of a randomized List. Then just set
it off - if it crashes along the way (ie, doesn't get to the end and
convert the running text log into an edat2 file) this is a sign you may
have a harder-to-detect codec issue to sort out. Better that it happens
this way than with a real participant.
4 - if you get this far, set up your real experiment and test it
completely under "realistic participant" conditions. Keep in mind that
the stress test in (3) may succeed but the real experiment may still
crash for one reason or another.
In addition to making sure your experiment does not crash, if timing is
an important consideration (and when is it not?), keep in mind that it
takes significant time to load and display video files. There are a
number of additional time audit features specific to MovieDisplays -
it's very wise to log these and get your timing sorted out before you
start running. Timing can be a real mess when you deal with video
stimuli and seems to depend a lot on the hardware.
For all of this, if you run into real problems, I strongly urge you to
open a support request with E-Prime support (even though you may want a
solution "today" and the support queue may be 10-12 days). Video
problems can be so complicated and idiosyncratic, and there may be known
bugs or still-undocumented features that could help you out a great
deal. I've had very good responses from support staff over the years,
but patience is required especially during the peak periods (eg start of
academic terms).
Whew, that's enough about my life story with video problems. When it
comes to video capture and conversion - our main setup for generating
E-Prime video from scratch involves initial processing on Apple hardware
(Final Cut Pro) from a range of DV cameras (our studio/video hardware is
apple-based), although I still use VirtualDub on some occasions.
Our biggest problems have come from videos that have gone through
quicktime formats (ugh!) and my advice is always to minimize the number
of conversions if you want an E-Prime-friendly video type - and stick to
a standard process using the same camera/settings/etc once you get
something that works - different cameras have different default settings
and it's best to stick with something that works wherever possible. And
don't ditch your original video files (even if they're huge) until you
know you have a conversion that works.
Many researchers will work hard to develop video stimulus materials that
display as well as possible in a media player, but this does not always
transfer to clean E-prime performance - if you know you are going to use
E-Prime with your videos, it's a good idea to get them E-Prime-friendly
first (really this is just as important a part of materials development
as other experimental controls you include). If your experiment doesn't
work there's no point in having nice presentation quality video stimuli.
hope this is useful to somebody!
-dv
--
David Vinson, Ph.D.
Senior Postdoctoral Researcher
Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department
University College London
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5311 (UCL internal ext. 25311)
David McFarlane
other discussions:
1) MPEG-1 seems to be sort of a "lowest common denominator" [FN1]
codec, and so might serve as the "safest" codec if we merely want to
get a movie to work in E-Prime at all. But other codecs may provide
higher performance.
2) For higher performance, we may find the best results with an .avi
file that uses DIVX video and MP3 for the audio. As for codec
libraries, both the true DIVX brand and ffdshow for divx should work fine.
Sorry I do not have finer details on this, I am not really versed in
video/audio codec lore. Much appreciated if someone could fill in
the details, or provide a link to a suitable discussion elsewhere.
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
[FN1] Should read, "greatest common divisor", see Wikipedia.
Lisa Levinson
I have successfully imported .avi files into EPrime. As you will notice in either the slide/movie image or movie feature you can indicate a start and stop time. The issue there seems to be duration, too short - as in ms - and you have problems. Since I did need ms clips I edited my video files into frame sequence video clips and saved as .avi files and successfully imported them to run in sequence. Because EPrime runs on a PC you have to run universal movie files compatible with PCs - I have had the most success with .avi files. Based on my experience you can generate a movie and/or use an existing movie so long as it is saved as an .avi. A great deal of trial and error was involved in determining what kind of files would open in EPrime, might be different with your system. Essentially, I saved my footage in a number of formats and then tested what would open. The issue I have had using video is the timing. I am looking to present 100ms clips and that becomes more complicated as EPrime seems to have issues loading the files quickly enough. Working on that issue as we speak.
Hope this is helpful though very after the fact.
Lisa Levinson
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Dave
Everybody please realize that AVI is but a *container* format (see
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Container_format_%28digital%29).
The type of container alone tells you little as to how its *contents*
(video and audio data) are encoded (cf.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats).
Bottom line: Just because it's called AVI doesn't mean it will work --
you still might have codec issues to deal with.
Just my $0.02,
-Dave
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Lisa Levinson
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