Transana is designed to help you analyze video data in several ways. Transana makes it easier to transcribe in detail and meticulously review selected portions of a video than do traditional video tape machines. That is, Transana facilitates a detailed "drill-down" approach to video analysis.
Transana allows you to examine your data by selecting the analytically interesting portions of the video. You can then organize these video portions (called Clips) into theoretically-related Collections to allow you to examine multiple examples of the same phenomenon. Determining what categories you want to explore and collecting Clips that apply is essentially a "deductive" process of data analysis.
Transana also allows you to assign analytic Keywords to your Clips, and it has search capabilities that allow you to combine and recombine your Clips into new Collections based on Keyword search results. Transana allows you to take a diverse set of Clips and perform data-mining to explore what relationships might exist. This is essentially an "inductive" process of data analysis.
Finally, you can use Transana to explore video for video case design. If you want to take a large amount of video and boil it down to a coherent case, Transana can facilitate the process of determining what parts of the video are of interest to illustrate a particular point. While Transana is not video-editing software, it can be useful in figuring out what to include and exclude, as well as in exploring the order in which Clips should be shown when building a video case. Thus, Transana works as an analysis tool for case development as well.