How do you index your Ray Mears clips?

July 23, 2008 2:39 PM

How can I add summary data to my video files?

I've recently started a project to put all of Ray Mears's survival tips into some sort of idexable format. At this early stage I'm taking the hour long TV episodes and splitting them into 20 or so short avi. clips. To do this I'm using Windows Movie Maker to view the show and strip out all the content that isn't pure Ray wilderness gold. The output avi. I then put through a simple wmv/avi. splitter.

My question is in two parts. The first general, second specific.

1) Am I going about this project in the best way? This is the first video editing Ive done, so if there is better software for stripping the useful content out of TV shows then please let me know.

2) I'm going to finish up with about 1000 clips of educational wilderness survival, and I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to organise them ... but I'm sure that the tagging needs to be done now. For example, a clip with Ray demonstrating how to build a pit oven I would tag "cooking" "woodland" "meat preparation" - I'm sure you get the idea. But how do associate these tags with the file? I assumed I would just be able to open each of the avi file's properties and add the tags as summary data. Alas no. The summary data is 'greyed out' so my plan appears to be foiled.

My concern about this greyed out quirk led me (via a google search) straight to those infuriating bastards at 'experts exchange' where my question has been posed:

"I'd like to enter some descriptive comments for some of my files, to view in explorer (via My Computer), but when I rightclick/properties/summary/simple, everything is greyed out (well, greened out)."

So google as fails me, my faith in the Hive Mind grows.

Thanks for reading all this.

posted by verisimilitude to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I posted a very similar question a while ago, but the answers were less than satisfactory. There appears to be no facility for adding metadata to files in windows.

I ended up using an ordinary text file.
posted by Pastabagel at 2:55 PM on July 23, 2008

AVI clips can be tagged using ABCAvi Tag Editor. If you then install the Info Tips Shell Extension found on the same page, you can view the info by mousing over a clip (see screenshot at lower left on that page). Media Player Classic (though probably not most players) can then read and and display the tags alongside the video.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 3:10 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite]

Re experts exchange: if you scroll waay down, past the hidden comments and the big grey "Experts Exchange Zones" box, you'll find the actual comments sneakily included at the bottom. Sadly, their advice for this problem is unhelpful.
posted by pocams at 3:13 PM on July 23, 2008

Windows Live Photo Gallery [free download] allows you to add tags and captions to images and videos, and you can search/sort with them. With JPEG files, the info is actually put into the JPEG metadata, but I don't know where it goes on other types of files. I just checked, and an AVI file tagged in Photo Gallery does NOT show the tags in Properties/Details [vista].

If you're willing to do the organizing work inside Photo Gallery itself then it doesn't really matter how it stores the tags. I find Photo Gallery fairly pleasant to work in.
posted by moonmilk at 4:42 PM on July 23, 2008