kingkong

Hi All, Bit of a problem. The camera I am working with was set to motion detection but a cobweb near the lens means many extremely long periods of motion were detected so as a result I have hours of footage - however I need to find a single event without having to manually watch all the footage. All the footage is night footage. The event I need to isolate will be lit up the the motion detection floodlights. Is there any software that will merge all the files into one and then search the video file to isolate the event by performing a detection of the change in lighting? ie. From dark to flood-lit? I have approximately 100 files which are all both .dav and also in .avi format after converting. Is this possible and which software would be required? Hope I have explained this clearly, thanks.

Thanks rory, that is awesome because I may have found part of the solution so far but was struggling to join all the avi's. I found VirtualDub so long, tested it with another avi, raised the thresh-hold and it seems to detect the changes - so it seems to offer some type of lighting/motion detection abilities. Now virtualdub also allows appending of avi's but it seems to be one at a time, unless there are other methods with VD I haven't found yet. I'm going to try your link above tomorrow. I may be half way there however it will be worth it in the long run as this will come in handy often. 2:30am off to bed. Thanks for the assistance, will work on it again tomorrow

thanks guys. will be cool some day when possible on a budget. will have to merge them & try pick it up on high speed.

Oh noes Seriously?

I have the converter so I have the files in both .dav and .avi. Just need to find software for Win XP that will search the video and locate the greatest change between frames when the floodlight switches on. Too painful to sit through +- 8 hours of night, having to open each file manually, even at 8x

All the files are on my PC running Win XP. So I would like to do this "off-DVR" ie. on the PC. I can work with the files in .dav or .avi format. Is there any software that will take an avi file, analyze it, and then create bookmarks where the change between frames is enormous? Like when a floodlight switches on at night? The period of time I am working on is approximately 8 hours.