Welcome to the Basic Trimmer’s

The Basic Trimmer is a tool to aid the use of Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA) through data preparation.

A major technical limitation in the study of complex social behavior of freely moving rodents is the bottleneck caused by manual annotation of behavior. Behavioral annotation can be subjective, extremely time-intensive, and prone to observer drift. Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA), an open-source package, uses machine learning (ML) approaches to automate behavioral predictions through the combination of pose estimation and supervised ML. Individual experiments often incorporate thousands of video recordings, all of which need to be preprocessed and maintained; this includes locating individual experimental trials, identifying behavioral events within each trial, and choosing trimming points to focus on specific behavioral epochs. Manual preprocessing and project management requires unfeasible effort, often yielding video datasets with inaccuracies in timing or content, leading to inaccurate ML predictive classifications.

The Basic Trimmer allows the user to navigate through all of the start/end points that they would like to trim and handles the trimming process for them.

Contents

• Usage
  • Installation
  • The Process
  • Part 1: Getting the Trim Points
    • Step 1. Run “basic_trimmer.py”. When the GUI opens up, it should look like the following:
    • Step 2: Navigate to the folder holding the videos to trim.
    • Step 3. Click “Next Video” to load in the first video you are going to trim.
    • Step 4. Click to change these properties.
    • Step 5: Navigate to first trial
    • Step 6: Click “Get trim points”
    • Step 7: Adding Trim Points
    • Step 8: Click Save
  • Part 2: Trimming the Video
    • Step 1. Run the “ffmpeg_trim.py” script
    • Step 2. Allow the script to run
• Tips and Tricks