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. 2017 Aug;49(4):1563-1568.
doi: 10.3758/s13428-016-0787-0.

The Simple Video Coder: A free tool for efficiently coding social video data

Daniel Barto  1 , Clark W Bird  2 , Derek A Hamilton  2 , Brandi C Fink  3
Affiliations

The Simple Video Coder: A free tool for efficiently coding social video data

Daniel Barto et al. Behav Res Methods. 2017 Aug.

Abstract

Videotaping of experimental sessions is a common practice across many disciplines of psychology, ranging from clinical therapy, to developmental science, to animal research. Audio-visual data are a rich source of information that can be easily recorded; however, analysis of the recordings presents a major obstacle to project completion. Coding behavior is time-consuming and often requires ad-hoc training of a student coder. In addition, existing software is either prohibitively expensive or cumbersome, which leaves researchers with inadequate tools to quickly process video data. We offer the Simple Video Coder-free, open-source software for behavior coding that is flexible in accommodating different experimental designs, is intuitive for students to use, and produces outcome measures of event timing, frequency, and duration. Finally, the software also offers extraction tools to splice video into coded segments suitable for training future human coders or for use as input for pattern classification algorithms.

Keywords: Behavior coding; Open-source software; Video analysis.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The SVC user interface depicting a training video of a research assistant. Panel A: The video display. Panel B: The coding options for the session. This panel also provides visual feedback when a code is on. Panel C: The codes logged with their onset and offset in seconds. Panel D: Controls for precise playback and options for setting code onsets with a mouse.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Overview of the SVC data processing. A researcher picks the coding scheme and hotkeys to be used for the project. SVC integrates the codes, and the user loads the video. Once the user codes the video two output comma separated values (.csv) files are generated. The first data file (.csv) contains the onsets of the codes and can be used to segment the original video or be reloaded into SVC to return to a previous coding session. The second output file contains the frequencies, total duration, and time to first onset of each behavior code.
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