Naming your video files

Lightning Pose expects Session and view names to be embedded in the filename as follows:

SESSION_VIEW.mp4

View is present only for multiview projects. For singleview projects, it’s just SESSION.mp4.

Session and View are identifiers that are used throughout a Lightning Pose project directory. Once that happens, they are hard to change. So it’s important to name them thoughtfully.

Tips: Plan for change

A simple and effective starting point for a naming convention is something like this:

SUBJECT_DATE_TIME_VIEW.mp4

It’s worth thinking about how your project might evolve over time. For example, if you anticipate cropping or clipping, you might say to yourself that you’ll embed more metadata like:

SUBJECT_DATE_TIME_CLIP_T1-T2_VIEW.mp4

If you have multiple methodologies for cropping, you might further extend the naming convention like so:

SUBJECT_DATE_TIME_CLIP_T1-T2_CROP_cropper_model_1_VIEW.mp4

The key is to think about what metadata you might want to incorporate later, and that your naming strategy is extensible to allow that.

However, as you add metadata, remember that VIEW must always be the last token in the filename, and VIEW should not contain underscores.

Use valid characters

Stick with filesystem and URL-safe characters: alphanumeric, -, _.

Stick with your naming scheme throughout the app

Whether you upload videos in the Labeler for extracting frames for labeling, or running model inference on a longer video, both of these videos will show up in the Viewer next to each other.

Using the same naming scheme across all videos allows you to identify them easily afterwards in the Viewer, or anywhere in the Project.