There are certain kinds of user research that require extreme video analysis, where you literally have to transcribe every utterance, gesture and movement, and a single hour of footage can take almost a day to analyse. You can imagine this is a painstakingly tiresome process, so this open source app by IBM researcher Eben Haber seems like it would be pretty useful:
The app is called Video Note Taker and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Once you’ve learned a few key combinations you can easily scrub back and forth through the footage at different speeds, bind each line of your notes to a timestamp in the video, and then (here’s the clever bit) jump to the point of in the video that each timestamp corresponds with.
There are a number of other apps that provide similar functionality – including Microsoft’s OneNote, the captioning tool in Techsmith’s Camtasia, and a whole ream of dusty-looking academic apps. However, since Video Note Taker is free, simple, and easy to learn, I can see it being quite popular within its niche.
Video Note Taker requires Quicktime and Java, and runs on both on Windows and OS X.
→ Find out more about Video Note Taker
(Found via Melissa Cefkin on the Athrodesign mailing list).
Related posts:
- Pear Note: record audio and video with your notes
- Cheap and Free Alternatives to Morae: Usability Testing Software.
- Multitouch with just a webcam. ‘Touchless’ – an open source project from Microsoft
- Gap in the market for a decent “live transcription A/V recorder” tool
- Yellowbird: 6 lens video camera produces 360° pannable video footage
Thanks for this info, Harry.
The Video Note Taker llooks like it would be useful to me in my work as a school psychologist.
We video tapes students during some of our assessments. We also record sessions with students who have autism spectrum disorders, and when gathering observational data.
I know that it is very time-consuming to look at lots of video! I know I’ll be trying it out soon.
that’s really informative for me
A related tool I’ve been using recently for transcriptions of contextual inquiry recordings is TAMS Analyzer . It’s also free and it includes the tools you need to take the next step with the transcript: thematic analysis.
I just found this blog post, thanks for publicizing my note taking tool. FYI, as of October 29, I just released a new version with some bug fixes, and better handling of keyboard shortcuts on the mac.