Review: Toki Shot Hitting the Mark
Software that promises to use algorhythms to analyse a movie and take much of the drudgery out of working out useage of acquired materials in a cut, has to be more than a shot in the dark.
It has long been a dream for anyone working with acquired content to be able to account for its use in a time based format like a TV programme using computer analysis of shots to take away the drudgery of analysing the video from this viewpoint in realtime. This French software which derives from the audio world, offers that possibility. It works on both Mac and PC platforms, where if you can put the DVD or movie video into Quicktime format - using conversion software or taking the output from popular edit programs like Final Cut Pro - this can be imported into Toki Shot. Once the detection settings are set to define the sensitivity of the shot analysis to the cuts, you leave the program to do its work. Miraculously, a complete shot breakdown appears in the main panel, with thumbnail images of the in and out points of each clip, the corresponding timecodes and even the durations. There is room to put in text descriptions or other metadata in a special field as you run down the analysis from the top of the screen. This is pretty important to add at this stage.
The most useful way of working with the software in its current form, to achieve tallies of archive used, is to add descriptive tags such as the source, bulletin, stockshot number etc in the scene description, then print a PDF of the whole document with the thumbnails before exporting a shot EDL and text file. It can be fiddly doing all of this and the user needs a set routine to maintain accuracy because the text export appears to supply durations for the individual shots but often seems to generate inaccurate outpoints and therefore durations. However with all three documents open, it is straightforward to run through the EDL which is accurate, marking key shots with the descriptions from the text file. It’s a pity these do not currently appear to be capable of being combined. The job of editing the shot analysis to leave just the relevant shots is a long and tedious task that has to be done manually, so this is best left as the master document for the analysis of the cut that includes everything, then the text file - which helpfully lists all the shots with descriptors attached first in its running order - can be used to edit the EDL into a proper reflection of the data which is relevant to the analysis, the archive clips for example.
All of this may sound a bit of a workaround the houses, but as with most of these kind of systems, once the software is set up and the routine is settled, it works rather well. The analysis takes a few minutes to run but then the three outputs provide a concise picture of the cut with the acquired elements listed. With a bit of judicious editing in the EDL list, a comprehensive breakdown of these components is shown. Durations can be added from the master document either in Toki Shot itself or from off the PDF.
That sounds like good news for anyone logging usage, who has ever had to sit down with a DVD, a stopwatch, an EDL and a pile of shotnotes to work these things out. The next incarnation of the program may nail some of the inconsistencies and make the software even better for this purpose. Imagine being able swiftly to delete the non-relevant cuts in the breakdown and export into an Excel spreadsheet or Filemaker database all the important data, to be retrieved by source, timecode, cost base or whatever is needed for compliance with all the licensing issues involved in using the material in the production. There are a good few production managers, editors, producers and archive researchers round the world who would eat their timelines to have that.
tokitest.com
