Video thumbnailing still only uses first 60 seconds?

[casper.sleeping]

Ultimate 2019 generates thumbnails for video files with snapshot intervals at about 25% increments of the video duration.

Ultimate 2020 started using only the first 60 seconds of a video file to generate the four snapshots that compose the thumbnail. I opened a ticket about this and that got me nowhere.

Upgraded to 2022 in hopes this was resolved and now stare at a folder of videos where the thumbnails are again identical because the first ~90 seconds of each video is identical. Scanning the same folder in 2019 results in unique thumbnails for each video.

Am I missing something post Ultimate 2019 in preferences or is there a config file somewhere that I can edit to change the snapshot intervals?

[Regor250]

I can only assume the change was implemented to speed up the thumbnail creation, but it would be nice to have the option nonetheless; shouldn't be too difficult I'd imagine.

[Greyfox]

casper.sleeping

Whilst I have many videos, there would be few that would be identical for the first 60 seconds, or anything like it, so the change is not something I had noticed until I read this thread,..

Like Regor250 I too would assume it would have been done to reduce the thumbnail creation time.

I would suggest you raise another support request, and ask specifically what progress has been made in regards to your previous request.

Because the change is almost certainly "by design", my guess is that getting the developers to revert to a previous method with probably a negative effect on performance (particularly with functions like Catalog where the process may have to build literally thousands of thumbnails) is not going to be a easy task.

A possible solution is to have a configuration item where users could select a frame number for each of the 4 frames shown in the thumbnail, with a default number for each that is within the first 30 or 60 seconds of the video. That way if left at defaults it would give minimum thumbnail creation time, but would allow users to take the sample from a wider range at perhaps a trade off in performance.