Use Cases

Archiving Full Broadcasts With and Without Commercials

Example:
A collector digitizes a 1992 NBC Sunday Night Movie from VHS. They want to preserve the entire broadcast — including vintage promos and ads — but they also want a clean, ad-free version for watching.

Why AdSlicerProXP Is Necessary:
Manual cutting risks trimming too tight or leaving partial commercials. AdSlicerProXP automatically detects black slugs that originally separated segments, correctly identifies ad breaks, and exports:

• /show/vhs_capture_show.mp4 → clean movie
• /commercials/vhs_capture_ad_XXXX.mp4 → all commercial blocks
• /logs/detect.json → reproducible archive metadata

Outcome:
Archivists get both the authentic historical object and a modernized clean playback master — all generated consistently and without hand-editing.

Digitizing VHS Tapes With Automatic Cleanup

Example:
A preservation group receives 300 home-recorded VHS tapes spanning 1986–2004. Each tape contains 2–6 hours of mixed programming with unpredictable commercial spacing.

Why AdSlicerProXP Is Necessary:
Batch-mode processing (--input-dir) allows them to digitize and process entire shelves of tapes at once.
Threshold tuning ensures blackdetect works on varied analog sources.

Workflow:

adslicerproxp \
  --input-dir /captures/raw_transfers \
  --glob "*.mp4" \
  --outdir /captures/processed \
  --black-min-dur 0.12 \
  --merge-gap 1.8 \
  -v

Outcome:
Hundreds of hours of content are automatically:

• segmented,
• cleaned,
• exported into uniform directory structures,
• and logged for verification.

This eliminates months of manual editing.

Preparing Footage for YouTube or Streaming Uploads

Example:
A creator wants to upload episodes of a 1990 cartoon recorded off Fox Kids.
The commercial breaks contain copyrighted ads that could trigger Content ID strikes.

Why AdSlicerProXP Is Necessary:
The creator needs predictable, machine-clean removal of commercials without touching the show content.

Workflow:

adslicerproxp \
  -i cartoon_ep4.mp4 \
  --outdir ./youtube_ready \
  --include-black \
  --reencode \
  -v

Outcome:
YouTube receives a clean master with reliable boundaries.
No leftover half-commercial frames = reduced risk of claims.

Building Training Sets for Machine Learning

Example:
A research lab is training a model to detect “commercial boundary transitions” in old broadcast content.
They need ground-truth timestamps for:

• black slugs
• merged black intervals
• detected ad gaps
• keep segments

Why AdSlicerProXP Is Necessary:
It automatically generates the labeled data they need.

Output Used for ML:

• detect.json — structured semantic intervals
• detect.csv — tabular timestamp breakdown
• separate commercial clips — positives
• show clips — negatives

Outcome:
A complete labeled dataset is produced without manual annotation, enabling ML teams to iterate quickly.

Creating Commercial Compilations

Example:
An editor wants to create a video titled “All McDonald’s Commercials From 1997 ABC Broadcasts.”
They have dozens of full-length recordings and want only the ad blocks, not the shows.

Why AdSlicerProXP Is Necessary:
Commercials are already cleanly extracted into:

commercials/
  tape1_ad_0001.mp4
  tape1_ad_0002.mp4
  tape2_ad_0001.mp4
  ...

Workflow:
The editor can drop all the extracted clips into a timeline or run a secondary script to sort by brand (e.g., via captioning or logo detection).

Outcome:
An hours-long compilation of ads assembled without touching an editing timeline manually.

6. High-Volume Cleanup for TV Archives and Libraries

Example:
A university digitization lab processes 1,200 Betacam SP and VHS tapes from 1980–2002.
Each tape contains long-form recordings with unpredictable ad patterns.

Why AdSlicerProXP Is Necessary:
They require a system that:

• produces consistent logs for auditing,
• preserves commercial breaks,
• generates clean show files,
• scales to thousands of hours,
• and requires minimal manual supervision.

Workflow:

adslicerproxp \
  --input-dir /library/raw_airchecks \
  --glob "*.mp4" \
  --outdir /library/processed \
  --black-min-dur 0.15 \
  --merge-gap 2.0 \
  --min-commercial 3 \
  --max-commercial 300 \
  -v

Outcome:
Every tape now has:

• a clean archival master,
• a full commercial archive,
• reproducible logs,
• uniform directory layout,
• and metadata ready for ingestion into a digital asset management system.

This brings large institutional archives into a standardized, searchable state.