How to find the moments worth using in a two-hour film
Ask Vizard Agent to build a timestamped visual map of the whole film first: one frame every forty-five seconds or so, laid out as contact sheets you can read in three passes. That map tells you which five or six windows are worth looking at properly, and only those get sampled densely enough to pick a shot from.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Ask for the map as a deliverable in its own right, and say roughly what you're hunting for: a mood, an action, a face, a landscape. If you ask Vizard Agent for a trailer straight away, you get one built from whatever it found first, and no way to tell what it passed over.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The method is two passes at two resolutions: one cheap and complete, then one expensive and deliberately narrow. Forty-five seconds is coarse enough that a two-hour film becomes a hundred and sixty frames, and fine enough that no sequence lasting more than a minute can hide from it. In the session behind this article it:
- Probed a feature film being cut into a sub-sixty-second theatrical trailer, read contact sheets of its opening and pinned the title-card timing frame by frame.
- Sampled a previous piece to learn the house style.
- Sampled the film every forty-five seconds and built timestamped contact sheets of the whole thing, read in thirty-minute passes because a hundred and sixty frames in one image is unreadable.
- Extracted dense frames from the windows the map flagged and built contact sheets for each candidate window.
- Reviewed each candidate by name, such as cannon-hauling, river crossing and night battle, so the edit could be discussed without going back to timecodes.
When does this not work well?
A coarse map misses short things. A three-second reaction, a single line of dialogue or a brief insert isn't reliably caught at one frame every forty-five seconds, so the interval has to come down. Dialogue-led films are better served by a transcript, and in a visually uniform film every sample looks the same.
Common questions
What interval should it use? Forty-five seconds suits a feature. Vizard Agent drops it for shorter material.
Does it need to watch the film? Not at first. Vizard Agent reads frames, which is far cheaper.
Can it match a previous piece? Yes. Give Vizard Agent an earlier trailer and it reads the house style from it.