About Transana
Transana helps researchers transcribe and analyze video and audio data. It provides a way to view video or play audio recordings, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video. It provides tools for identifying and organizing analytically interesting portions of video or audio files, as well as for attaching keywords to those video or audio clips. It also features database and file manipulation tools that facilitate the organization and storage of large collections of digitized video.
More specifically, Transana allows users to:
- Import and play MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and AVI format video and MP3 and WAV format audio files. (Other video and audio formats also work with Transana. See the Discussion Board for limitations.)
- Easily create transcripts of the videos. Special symbols for Jeffersonian Transcription are readily accessible, but are not required.
- Navigate through videos using several different mechanisms including a precise Waveform image.
- Link frames in the video to positions in a transcript by imbedding video time codes in the transcript.
- Automatically highlight the relevant portion of the transcript while the video plays.
- Select analytically interesting portions of the video, which can be organized into meaningful groups.
- Define keywords and apply them to portions of video.
- Search for instances of keywords and see the video clips to which they have been applied.
- Transfer video files to and from a Storage Resource
Broker (SRB), a computer system with massive storage capacity.
Transana's Main screen looks like the image below (with example video and waveform)
As you can see, Transana is made up of a Sound Waveform, a Video Window,
a Transcript Window, and a Database tree.
The Sound Waveform presents a visual representation of the audio track of the video being analyzed. This allows for great precision in selecting portions of the video for analysis. Although not all researchers require the level of precision this window allows, it is nice to have it when it is needed.
The Video Window is responsible for displaying the video.
The Transcript Window is a word-processing window that allows users to easily create transcripts for videos. A frame in the video can be linked to a position in the transcript by inserting Time Codes, and this allows Transana to synchronize video playback with portions of the transcript.
The Database tree gives a visual representation of the organization of data within Transana, making it easy to manage even large collections of analytically interesting video clips. Analytic Keywords can be assigned to segments of video data, and Transana's Search features allow for increasingly sophisticated data mining.
Using these windows and Transana's tools, you can easily tag meaningful segments of video and attach analytic keywords to them. You can group your video clips in a variety of ways to assist in the analysis of your data, and you can perform searches to discover meaning in your data you could not see otherwise. Transana is designed to help you find the meaning within video data more easily than with other analytic tools.
In addition, there is a multi-user version, Transana-MU, which allows users to share their data and analyses with other research team members on a LAN.