Detecting Full Screen Logos

Here you can ask your questions on how to use Comskip for the detection of commercials. Also questions on how to remove commercials are welcome
Post Reply
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

Hi,
Very interested in your application. Before I give it a go I'm hoping you can advise whether it is likely to help with my project. Like any really effective tool it looks from "A short guide to tuning Comskip" that there is a bit of a learning curve, but great flexibility in configuration.

I've been using VRD with Ad Detective and AHK for breaking my recorded videos down into segments. I record any program that I can find where the object is to visit restaurants and review the experience, mostly on the Food Network, like Diners Drive-ins & Dives etc.. These shows usually visit multiple locations in a single show and my objective is to break the show down into separate files for each loaction. Extracting the commercials is a good start but frequently there are also full screen animated logos that are good indicators of where segments of the show start and end. The logos are usually predominantly a single or dual color background which I think might make it easier to detect. Also, there are usually a limited number of show sequences for any given show, so for example, for DDD the typical sequence is: Drive up, Show Intro, Drive On, Starting Logo(~10 sec), Show Segment A, Show Logo, Segment B Tease, Commercial Block, etc. Only the commercials are bracketed by black frames so alot of manual editing is required to edit down to what I want.

So my questions are:
1. Is Comskip likely to be able to be configured to detect the start and end points of these full screen logos?
2. Might it also be possible to configure Comskip to somehow indicate Segments such as Show Intro, Tease 1, etc.? Doubting this one is likely but had to ask.

Thanks for your attention. It looks like you are doing a real service supporting this community of users.
ed
erik
Site Admin
Posts: 3368
Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:49 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by erik »

Search for "cutscene" and "comskip"

Comskip can have up to eight cutscene frames defined that can help to create cutpoints.
Full frame logo's that NEVER change are perfect for that.
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

I've reviewed the informaiton I could find, some of which I admittedly did not understand. I probably have some .ini setting wrong but I can not get cut scene to work.

Here is what I did:

Edit down a show to just several transitions that I would like to have Comskip ID.
Dump a couple frames where the transition occurs.
change the .ini file to add

detect_method=171
cutscenefile1="G:\FOR VRD Processing\COMSKIP Tests\BTIEA ALL WHITE pre Flay.dmp"
cutscenefile2="G:\FOR VRD Processing\COMSKIP Tests\BTIEA ALL WHITE pre Wynn.dmp"
cutscene_threshold=10

and run it through ComskipGui. Unfortunately nothing was found except for one marker for VRD, which was 5 frames from the end of the clip and not at all different from the adjacent frames, so not sure what was going on there.

After the analysis I realized that several of the break points I want could also be identified by the uniformity threshold, so I tried changing:

validate_uniform=0
non_uniformity=2000
but still nothing except that 1 odd frame near the end.

What other setting do i need to change in order to get VRD marks for the frames that match the cutscenes and the frames where the non-uniformity falls below the 2000 threshold.

TIA for any assistance.
ed
erik
Site Admin
Posts: 3368
Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:49 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by erik »

You need to have double backslash in the file names.
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

erik wrote:You need to have double backslash in the file names.
You mean like this?

cutscenefile1="G:\\FOR VRD Processing\COMSKIP Tests\BTIEA ALL WHITE pre Flay.dmp"
cutscenefile2="G:\\FOR VRD Processing\COMSKIP Tests\BTIEA ALL WHITE pre Wynn.dmp"
cutscene_threshold=10

same result
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

For now I'm setting aside the cutscene problem and focus on getting VRD Scene marks at the cut points Comskip is finding. When i run my test file it marks the all white screens, or at least 5 out of 6 of them as black frames based on uniform settings, so I get lines like:

Frame 18 -- Black frame because large scene change of #, uniform ###

but I think since it only finds that one frame and it is too long until another frame is found it does not create a new block (the entire file is reported as one block) and therefore nothing gets marked.

Is there a way to adjust ini settings so that I get a scene marker in VRD at those points where a black frame is found without consideration for trying to find blocks. My goal is to break up the recording into segments of the show rather than only wipe out the commercials. I can do that in VRD manually if Comskip just marks the segment divisions which are the all white or nearly all white frames.

Thanks for any help.
ed
erik
Site Admin
Posts: 3368
Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:49 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by erik »

When you select videoredo as output format comskip will output both the list of commercials and ALL cutpoints comskip has identified as chapter markers.
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

emailed the ini, ref, log and csv files as well as a screen shot showing where Comskip finds black frames and the resulting VRD VPrj files.
Same questions as in the email:

1. Do I have cutscene files indicated correctly? The .dmp files are from frame 18 and frame 159, both marked as Black Frames by Comskip.
2. Why does Comskip not add the Black Frames it finds as VRD Scene Marks?

Thanks for your help
erik
Site Admin
Posts: 3368
Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:49 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by erik »

Further to my mail

All back slashes in cutscene file names should be double

Example
cutscenefile1="G:\\FOR VRD Processing\\COMSKIP Tests\\BTIEA ALL WHITE pre Flay.dmp"
cutscenefile2="G:\\FOR VRD Processing\\COMSKIP Tests\\BTIEA ALL WHITE pre Wynn.dmp"
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

The setting you suggested made the difference, but turns out the breaks i was looking for were not the most indicative of the overall shows, so pass on pursueing that strategy.
And the double backslashes solved the cutscene issue. :D Thanks for the help.

The one thing that confuses me is that the scene mark seems to consistently be 3 or more often 4 frames before the actual break point of the video. Any idea why that is ? Is there another setting I can change?
Thanks again for the help
ed
WarmBeer
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:42 pm

Re: Detecting Full Screen Logos

Post by WarmBeer »

So the next issue I run into is trying to block out a full screen logo sequence. I've got the cut scene feature working but since the star in the logo slowly rotates and then is the same for multiple frames Comskip is finding a frame in the middle of the sequence where as I want to mark the start and the end of the sequence. I'm playing around with the cutscene_threshold setting but wondering if there are other settings I should be looking at.

Here is a short file with several of the sequences to see an example.
http://youtu.be/HBGxSKdxwAU

ed
Post Reply