Templates for Chapters in SimpleMovieX

Sebastian, a SimpleMovieX user, recently asked how he could automatically insert a chapter marker every 5 minutes.

The short answer: It’s not possible … directly.
There’s no such thing as an entry in the Chapter action menu that says: “Insert every 5 minutes”.

The design guideline I’m trying to follow in SimpleMovieX is: Keep it simple. Instead of adding a lot of options and features, I try to add ways of collaborating with other applications. So that SimpleMovieX leverages their power instead of getting bloated.

For chapters, this design philosophy is embedded in the Copy and Paste Chapter Markers commands. Not very visible, but very efficient.

The idea is that the contents of the Chapters table is transcribed in a regular text document. You can use a text editor to create or modify it. Then the text can fill back the Chapters table.

So, back to Sebastian’s question: How can I insert a chapter marker every 5 minutes?

(Higher quality movie available here).

First, you create a text template that tells to insert a chapter at the beginning, after 5 minutes, after 10 minutes, and so on… Launch you favorite text editor and type:

[00:00:00.000]
Chapter #1
[00:05:00.000]
Chapter #2
[00:10:00.000]
Chapter #3
[00:15:00.000]
Chapter #4
[00:20:00.000]

One line indicates the time in the format [hh:mm:ss.xxx] where hh, mm and ss stand for hours, minutes and seconds. And the next line indicates the name of the chapter.

Once the template is created, you save it.

Second and last step: You copy the text, go to SimpleMovieX, and do Paste Chapter Markers.
Automatically, the table content is replaced by our template. Chapters nicely located at 5 minutes intervals.

If the movie has a duration greater than 25 minutes, then you will write a template that goes until 3 or 4 hours. When it is applied to a movie, for example a 90 minutes movie, the chapters will go beyond the end of the movie.

But that’s not really a problem, as by doing Edit > Trim, the chapters in excess will be deleted.