Automatic Scene Detection

[Paul Galbraith]

I've had many versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements from version 8 through version 14.  I recently wanted to upgrade to 2019 but was unable to convert my version 14 catalog due to a schema conversion error ("schema conversion failed, aborting" as reported in the conversion log).

Assuming that the problem is in the catalog file itself, and being somewhat technically inclined, I started digging into the catalog internals using the freely available "DB Browser for SQLite" tool.  I noticed many broken foreign keys in the database, which has lead me to suspect that the problem may be related to video scenes that the auto-analyzer has identified in my video files.

It used to be (at least in version 8 and I'm sure many subsequent versions) that the organizer had a background thread that would analyze all imported media files and apply smart tags to help suggest quick fixes for photos, as well as to automatically identify video scenes in a single video file and then split them out and add them to the organizer much like a stack of photos.  In the current version I have (version 14) that no longer seems to be the case, I can't find any options in the organizer for this sort of analysis any more, and my more recently imported video files are no longer split into scenes.  I'm trying to figure out if this is because the feature is no longer present in Premiere Elements 14, or if it's simply not working for me any more or maybe moved to some new location and I just don't have it enabled.

Can anyone confirm if this feature, which definitely used to be present in Elements circa v. 8/9/10, was later removed (and if so in what release/version was it removed)?  Or if it was never removed how can I get it enabled and working again in Elements 14?

Has anyone else had a success story here, trying to repair a catalog that was damaged by scene detection in the auto-analyzer?  (And of course I could be completely wrong in my suspicion here, so any other suggestions for repairing a large catalog would be greatly appreciated -- I've already tried all the built-in repair/optimize options in Elements itself.)

[Paul Galbraith · Accepted solution]

Installing and testing some older PRE versions I've been able to figure out a few things at least.

• Sometime around PRE version 13 or 14, the "auto-analyzer" feature was removed from the organizer and moved into PRE itself.
• The analyzer is now only triggered by certain video editing tools, such as autotrim, when you use these tools on a specified video clip.
• The auto-analyzer still creates XMP files in your catalog's "CAXMPFiles" directory, the name of the file name is "<id>.xmp" where <id> is the media ID of the clip as identified in the media_table table inside the catalog database.
• The organizer will still show a video clip broken down into automatically detected scenes after the auto-analyzer is triggered in PRE.

Sadly none of this directly helped in getting my catalog to convert, but maybe this info is still of use/interest to other people out there 🙂

[SylNYC]

Adobe has announced Scene Edit Detection function coming to Premiere Pro soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kbkRHVZfgA