The Video Extender provides a set of application programming interfaces that you can use to find shots or frames in a video clip. After you find the shot or frame, you can access data about it, such as the starting and ending frame numbers of the shot, or the pixel content of a frame. You can then pass this information to a program for further processing. For example, you can pass the content of a frame to a program capable of displaying it.
The Video Extender also provides APIs to store shot data in a shot catalog. The shot catalog can be in a database or a file. You can access the shot catalog in a file, or you can access a read-only view of the shot catalog in a database.
A shot catalog file contains fields for the following data:
The view of the shot catalog in a database contains columns for the following data:
You can access the data in a shot catalog file or query the data when the shot catalog is in a database. The representative frame information is particularly useful in displaying storyboards. In addition, if the shot catalog is in a database, you can join the shot data with related data in other tables. For example, personnel in the video studio can create a shot catalog in a database. They can then join the catalog data with a table that contains the video clips as well as information about the clips. In this way they will be able to use a single query to retrieve a clip and business information about the clip, as well as identify shots within the clip.