#video based research

[rocketboytom]

Automatically synchronized audio and notes

Here's an idea for interviews. AudioNote is an iOS app designed for people who want to take notes during lectures. It records audio and has a note pad. Everytime you make an entry on the note pad, it tags the place in the audio recording that the entry was made. The result is written notes that are synchronized with the audio. Used during interviews instead, AudioNote offers a useful way to make notes without needing to manually record times or try to describe the point in the interview. Managing an interview is already a difficult task and trying to take notes makes it even harder. Anything that can make the process easier is probably worth a try.

[rocketboytom]

iOS video-screen-capture part 2

Apple seems to have a problem with people capturing screen-video directly from an iOS device so they are not approving apps that allow it. This is a pain for anyone doing research that could benefit from screen-videos (like me).

Looking for a work around, I came across Matt Galligan's really well put together instructions for using AirPlay to share an iOS device screen to a Mac. By setting a Mac up as an AirPlay receiver, it is possible to share an iOS screen and then do the capturing on the Mac side. It turns out to be a fairly robust way to do recording and has the added benefit of being wireless (within a given WIFI network).

[rocketboytom]

iOS video-screen-capture

UPDATE: Apple has decided they don't like this kind of thing and have removed Display Recorder and similar apps from the App Store. Looks like Jailbreaking is the only option again.

I recently came across this new app, Display Recorder, that can record video of the screen and sounds from any iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch). This has some great research potential and though it has been possible to do this with jailbroken devices for a while, the new feature is that it allows researchers to record the screens of participants own devices not only those provided as part of a study.

There are some issues noted by reviewers that might cause researchers trouble such as the app not recording the viewing window when users take videos or photographs with the cameras on their devices, but many of these appear to have workarounds described on the developer's how-to page.

Here's hoping that the developer, Bugunsoft, adds the ability to simultaneously record the screen and back-facing camera on iPhones and iPads. Screen action and the user in a single split-screen video, that would be a dream mobile-tech research app!

[rocketboytom]

Password protecting videos for distribution to participants

Until relatively recently Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a bit of a dirty term for me. If I had any interaction with a media file that had been locked with DRM so that it could only be used for a set period or on a specific computer, it was a frustrating experiences. I never imagined that I would end up trying to add DRM to videos myself.

A few weeks ago, a research project I am working on was faced with an ethical dilema. We had filmed in several classrooms and needed to send the videos to the teachers so that they could review them before attending focus groups where they would discuss their practices. The problem was that we could not get ethical approval to distribute the videos online or via DVDs because of the risk that they would fall into the wrong hands. What we needed was video files that could only be seen with a password and could not be copied. The solution was a relatively simple form of DRM.

The solution I found was to use a program called GreenForce Player to create self-contained video players for each file. GreenForce is not a particularly nice video player but it has one very unusual feature. It allows you to lock a video with a password, prevent it from being copied, have it become un-readable after a specific date, and even make it so that it will only play on one specific computer. Unlike most very complicated commercial DRM systems, GreenForce is free and relatively simple to use. The only major downside I could find is that it is Windows only (all our teachers are Windows users but our research team are mostly Mac users) .

For our particular application, we distributed a DVD to each teacher with their video clips packaged as GreenForce self-contained players. We gave all the videos for a single teacher the same password and set the files to become unreadable a few days after the focus-group sessions. To be sure that the teachers could all play the videos regardless of what software they had on their PCs, we also distributed the K-Lite Codec Basic Pack on the DVDs and asked them all to install it. Following this procedure we had no problems with teachers not being able to play the files.

[rocketboytom]

My qualitative video analysis workflow

A lot of people have been asking me recently how I use Transana and it's an interesting question for me too so I thought I would jot down my process. The truth is, I use Transana as the key tool in a bigger workflow that includes video editing and transcription software along with other qualitative analysis software. By coincidence, most of the software I use is cross-platform so, despite being a Mac user, my workflow would look pretty similar on Windows.

Starting at the point of having video recorded on a camera, my workflow tends to look something like this (though it depends a bit on what my research goal is):

Use MPEG Streamclip to capture and compress the video from the camera. See this post for the settings I use.

If the video is of an interview, transcribe it using Transcriva (a similar program for Windows users is Inqscribe). Export the transcript as an RTF file and then use my home-built conversion process to convert the Transcriva time codes to a format Transana can read.

Import the video (and transcript if its an interview) into Transana. See this post for some videos help on working with Transana.

If the video is of observational in nature, create a content log (as a fake transcript) with time coding in Transana. This or a detailed transcript allows clips to be identified and categorized.

Usually at this point, I create keywords for structural characteristics such as which participant is speaking and the materials involved. I then go through the video and identify where these characteristics exist. This gives me a way to break down the video and if I have a lot of videos, it allows me to search across them for similar instances.

Using the clips and keywords functions in Transana, I identify and organize instances across the video data I have. I tend to work in an inductive recursive way and as I create new categories and keywords, I go back through the instances I have already identified.

Once I have identified specific short sections of a video or videos that I want to perform more detailed analysis on, I the move to Elan using the conversion workflow described here.

[rocketboytom]

Transana to Elan Workflow

Transana is very good for organizing collections of video data, transcribing (though I prefer to transcribe in Transcriva) and identifying clips. It does not, however, allow the kind of multimodal detailed analysis of clips that ELAN does. This workflow describes a process for transferring a video clip identified and transcribed in Transana to ELAN for further analysis. It use MPEG Streamclip as an intermediary program to process the video. In Transana

Right click on the clip you want to work with in ELAN

Select 'Clip Properties'

Make a note of the clip start and end points

Copy the clip transcript to the clipboard

In MPEG Streamclip

Open the video file that the clip is part of

On the main menu select 'Edit'→'Go to Time...'

Select 'Selection'

Enter the clip start and end points

Select 'OK'

On the main menu select 'Edit'→'Trim'

On the main menu select 'File'→'Export to Quicktime...'

Choose H.264 compression quality 100%

Select 'Limit Data Rate' and set it to 1024 Kbps

Choose 'MPEG-4 AAC' 'Stereo' 'Auto' '128 kbps' for Sound

Set Frame Size to 'unscaled'

*Note: You can save these settings as a preset by selecting 'Presets...'

Select 'Make Movie'

In ELAN

Create a new file with the video clip attached

Paste the clip transcript from Transana into an annotation that lasts for the entire clip

Copy and paste the clip transcript text from the general annotation as you add more detailed annotations

*Note: Clip export is planned for future versions of Transana. It will significantly reduce the complexity of this process.

[rocketboytom]

Transana video tutorials

Transana is an application developed by David Woods which can run on either Mac OS X or Windows and allows users to perform qualitative analysis of video and audio data. In many ways it is similar to other QDA software like Atlas.ti or Nvivo but with much better features for handling video data such as interviews and observations.

The really useful basic feature of Transana is that videos are synchronized with their transcripts so that when an instance is coded in either the video or the transcript it is automatically connected to the other.

This series of tutorials cover the basic concepts needed to start using Transana to do qualitative analysis of video (or audio) data.

Getting started

Adding video

Creating or importing a transcript

Identifying instances

Defining keywords

Useful Transana keycommands

Ctrl-D Pause / Play video

Ctrl-S Pause video / Rewind video 2 seconds and play

Ctrl-A Rewind video 10 seconds and play

Ctrl-F Fastforward 10 seconds

Ctrl-T Insert time point