Overlaying/generating beeps & pauses during video

[jmelvin]

I am at a loss, I really look forward to your insight!

I am involved in on a social services research team. We have lots of DVD-media DV video to "code" for our research. Transcoding to any number of formats is not difficult.

However, I would like to be able to overlay 20-second interval repeating beeps onto transcoded video. Ideally, the media player would either pause automatically or there would be a 3 second pause in the video to allow the researcher to pause the video.

This would allow them to "code" information they witnessed in the video. I.E. youth showed empowerment, more than 1 professional talked, cross-talk was witnesssed, etc.

Please help! We need to be able to have the video pause, beep, and or stop across all viewings of the same material. Thank you for your time!

[daamon]

Hi jmelvin,

Welcome to the forums.

You'll need to edit the original footage to actually include the gaps you want and, at the same time, insert the audio where you want it.

A simple editor will be sufficient for this task, but I'm confused as to what format your original footage is in - this will dictate tool recommendations. Is it DVD (i.e. MPG) or DV AVI?

[jmelvin]

Thank you. Well... its raw DV video, but I didn't figure the original source format was such a concern. I can easily transcode to other formats.

What editor might you suggest for editing the source material to generate repeating audio beeps and/or pauses? This would be exceptional if I could batch automate such work to parse/edit multiple video clips.

[daamon]

Keep it as DV - that's perfect for editing.

You only need a basic video editor, so something like Windows Movie Maker or AVITricks will suffice. Drop the video onto the timeline, cut the video where you want to have the breaks, insert a gap (or even a title to prompt the presenter), and overlay your audio beeps as appropriate.

Save back to DV AVI.

If you're looking to create the beeps, I don't know of anything but I'd be inclined to download an audio clip for the beeps.

Do what you need with it from there.

[jmelvin]

This makes good sense. Given the scope of our research project, I anticipate needing to parse or "prepare" 150-200+ different hour+ long video segments.

Is there any way I might be able to automate timeline gap & beep generation? We have access to Adobe Premiere. So far, I have not been able to figure out how to generate beeps at repeating, regular intervals.

I hope to be able to make this relatively low-muss so any of our research assistants can prepare video they are about to "code."

Thank you much for your help thus far!

[daamon]

Hmmm... I'm not aware of any way to automate what you want to do - in Premiere or otherwise. But I've never needed to perform a repetitive task even though I use Premiere.

Someone may know a way of doing waht you want to do with Avisynth, but that's just a guess on my part.

Good luck!