Fast video indexer has a few advanced options that are useful to know. The advanced settings are hidden down on the options page. Changing them might have some not so obvious effects though logical if you know what really goes on.
Changing properties
Start the FastVideoIndexer program. Go to the options screen where you can change how many frames to capture from a video and what types of indexes you want to generate, there you will find a button titled advanced. Click the button and the "Advanced dialog" shows up. In the advanced dialog you can click on each property and change its value at the bottom of the window you see a short explanation of each property.
Scalefactor
Scale factor is a scaling factor applied to thumbnails on the html and index pages. By default all thumbnails are scaled down 50%. If you don’t scale down the images and the video file you capture from is in highresolution the generated index picture might get very large. This especially applies if you capture a lot of frames from the video. Note that the captured video frame files are not scaled the scaling is only in the presentation.
CS Height Min
Cs height min determines the minimum height of the generated index picture in pixel lines. Even if you only capture one image from a video and it’s of very low resolution you will get a generated index picture at least this height.
Imageformat
Imageformat is the image file format that will be used for captured video frames and for video index pictures. Imageformat can be set to 0 to save in the jpeg file format or 1 to save in the BMP fileformat. By default Fast video indexer saves everything as jpeg. The jpeg format gives a good trade-of between image quality and file size. The bmp file format is loss-less and will produce higher quality video frames. If you are going to edit the video frames you would use the bmp format and then save the images as jpeg from you image program.
Name by frame
When Name by frame is set to its default value of 0 each capture image will be named with the time from where in the video it was captured. If Name by frame is set to 1 each captured image will be named by the frame number in the video. Name by frame is mostly useful when you capture every image from a video and want them numbered in sequence for further processing by other software.
CS width min
CS width min determines the minimum width of the generated index picture in pixel rows. The program will try to fit three images in width if the width still is smaller than this the generated index picture will still have this width.
Jpeg quality
Jpeg quality tell how hard to compress all jpeg pictures. Jpeg is a lossy compression format that will destroy information. By default this value is set to 85 which is a good trade-of between size and quality. A higher value here gives better quality and larger files. A lower value will give you lower quality and a smaller file. The quality parameter must be set between 1 and 100. Remember that even if you would capture video frames without any compression artefacts the video file in itself has probably several types of compression on every frame.
Least nof frames
Least nof frames set a minimum number of frames to capture from a video regardless of the value entered in the main options. If the least nof frame value is more than how many frames would be captured by using the settings values (start capture and time between captures) the least nof frames value will be used. When the least nof frame is in effect the captured frames will spaced with equal distance throughout the video file. This feature is really useful when you batch capture several rather short video clips.
Conclusion
One you have used FastVideoIndexer a few times it might be a good idea to change the default advanced options. You might also want to customize the output even more by changing the templates used by FastVideoIndexer.
