Have you ever had a brilliant idea for a supercut video, only to be thwarted by the overwhelming tedium of editing it into being? Well, it’s finally time to realize your supercut video dreams, because artist and game designer Sam Lavigne has essentially created the cotton gin of supercut video production with an open source python script that automatically “searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds.” You can see an example of what the script is capable of in the video above called Time In Time, which compiles every mention of the word “time” in the film Time.
The script searches through a video’s associated subtitle file (which needs to be in the same folder as the video, in standard .srt format), identifies timestamps for the dialog, and then uses the wonderful moviepy library to generate the new final cut.
The script can also work with multiple videos in the same directory, so a supercut could be complied from separate episodes of an entire television series. Keep in mind, however, that “the accuracy of the edits is completely reliant on the accuracy of the subtitle tracks.”
So, now you have no excuse to keep you from making all the amazing supercut ideas that you can conjure up, but you may be hard-pressed to come up with anything more inspired than this additional supercut example called Total Silence, which Lavigne made from all of the silent moments in the film Total Recall.
Lavigne is encouraging others to “mess around” with his script on github and is also accepting source material suggestions, so hurry up and cut to a montage of yourself making supercuts!
[via Man Bartlett]
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