Video handling in Igor 9

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Tue, 11/01/2022 - 06:55 am

Hello,

Has the handling of video changed in Igor 9 compared to 8? In Igor 6 I had written several routines to rapidly navigate around a video clip, including skipping by a certain number of frames forward or backward. Due to changes in the Mac OS, video handling in Igor 8 no longer allowed this. I have to choose between opening a video file for rapid access/playing, in which case skipping frames forwards takes seconds, and skipping backwards is not possible; and opening a video file for skipping around, in which case playing smoothly is not possible.

I plan to upgrade to Igor 9 soon, but I also need to decide on an analysis workflow to show a time signal synchronized to a video clip. The video clip shows a pair of feet walking, and the signal is acceleration from wearable sensors on the feet. In Igor 8 I switched to exporting a video file of the Igor graph and then adding to the video clip in a video editor.

If Igor 9 can again implement rapid navigation across a video file, I would revert to doing everything in Igor which was much more powerful as it allowed fast interaction.

Pietro

This is the only movie related entry in the what's new in IP9 help file:

The PlayMovie operation was changed on Macintosh so that the movie file is always passed to the operating system to be opened with the default program for the given extension. The /W flag is also always ignored. Note that the movie is not automatically played--the user will need to manually play the movie. These changes were required due to removal of features in macOS Catalina (10.15). This has always been the behavior on Windows.

Some users have mentioned using the third-party tool ffmpeg (called from Igor using ExecuteScriptText). We don't have experience using ffmpeg so can't provide support for it, but it's a powerful tool that can probably do most of what you want to do given sufficient time figuring out how to get it to work.

November 1, 2022 at 07:43 am - Permalink