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).