Video annotations made easy

There's a project in the lab that looks at the use of some new technology and how this technology is best applied within a certain context (also perhaps, how people should change their behavior to improve the outcome). Anyway, what we will end up doing is observe a number of people and making video recordings. Throughout the experiment, these people will be talking to exchange ideas and point all noses in the same direction. At the same time, some interaction will occur through this technology, which is not easily captured on screen. However, because we deal with the tech directly, we can send events or information on a different channel, such that it can be superimposed back on video or at least related in time with certain points in the interaction.

I considered that for the purposes of analysis, it would be handy to make annotations on the video stream itself and refer to it later in time. The idea is that you can call attention or apply markers on the stream, such that particular events are easier to recognize and navigate to later. In essence, it's the same as what YouTube provides, except that we don't want these videos to be put on there yet, also because the duration of the video may be well about an hour or so.

ELAN is a nice tool that I found that has all the characteristics that we intend to use. It allows you to import an audio or video stream, which then can be annotated over the entire timeline for different events. As far as the technology events go, I've proposed to overlay that on the original video using a library called opencv. What you get is a static image that has all the events of the interaction between people, their audio, the things they did using the technology with annotations (in the form of subtitles) added by the experimenters. That way, the output video is a comprehensive output of the entire experiment, which can be replayed in good quality video players that can use subtitles in the SRT format.

Anyway, ELAN can also export to other text formats, including HTML or anything, which will also allow you to translate or transcribe entire videos and post a log of what happened somewhere. The only thing that it doesn't allow you to do yet is to output the whole thing to some directory, where you get a flash video file of some sorts, together with an HTML file + Javascript to be able to jump to each annotation from there.