Cinemetrics is an open-access interactive website and browser extension designed to collect, store, and process statistical data about films. Its goal is to create an extensive multi-faceted collection of digital data which will enable researchers to explore structure and evolution of film editing. Cinemetrics is programmed to handle the aspect of editing known in film studies as cutting rates, enabling film scholars to obtain and present cutting-related data in a more flexible way than previously available, recording and storing the time-span of each separate shot. This demonstrates a film’s cutting swing (standard deviations of shorter and longer shots from its average shot length), its cutting range (difference in seconds between the shortest and the longest shot of the film), and its dynamic profiles (polynomial trendlines that reflect fluctuations of shot lengths within the duration of the film).

Scholars use the Cinemetrics browser extension to log cuts—with frame-level accuracy—while viewing a film.  This data is then stored in OCHRE and published in a publicly-accessible database as an interactive visualization.

The Thing (1985) shot data, submitted by Cinemetrics user Mikulas Valicek

For more on Cinemetrics …

Cinemetrics Across Boundaries: A Collaborative Study of Montage with support from the Neubauer Collegium, 2013- 2015.