Naming with a truncated version of the ancestor's name.

[ruck94301]

User reports that in some operations in LabGym, new files or directories are named with a truncated version of
their ancestor.

When automatically naming some data containers produced by LabGym (files and dirs), if the naming is truncated/restricted in length, then can the outputs overlap and lose info that's encoded in the naming?

On 2025-10-18, Henry says this would be a problem, but he hasn't encountered it, so needs details.

All the information encoded in the file name is critical for users to know their settings if they forget what they set. This is useful if a user wants to go back to a dataset generated years ago. So yes, if the naming is truncated/restricted in length, such information will be lost. By the way, which system restricts the length of file names? I have never seen this on my systems.

[LSBuenoJr]

For additional context, this thread concerns the video preprocessing module, i.e., the tool we use to increase contrast, crop/trim videos, etc.

Currently, when a video is preprocessed, the output file is renamed using only the first few characters of the original filename (about five, from what I recall), followed by a fixed “preprocessed” suffix. This is inconvenient when filenames contain experimental metadata.

For example, if you have a filename like this: Mouse123_DrugABC_DateOfRecording.mp4

The preprocessed output will look like: Mouse123_preprocessed.avi

It should rather look like: Mouse123_DrugABC_DateOfRecording_preprocessed.avi

So that all metadata are preserved.

Also (and unrelated to filename metadata) the preprocessed videos are generally much larger than the raw input videos. I often see 800 MB mp4 videos being preprocessed into 6 GB avi videos with no apparent change in resolution. This is yet another area of improvement for the preprocessing stage.

[yujiahu415]

What you mentioned in your example is not expected to happen. After preprocessing, the name should be 'Mouse123_DrugABC_DateOfRecording_preprocessed.avi', at least in my hand. Can you provide the version of LabGym you used, the OS info, the python version, and one of the videos that had this issue so that I can try to reproduce this issue?

[ruck94301]

To Lezio & Antwan, can you can provide info to help Henry reproduce the issue, specifically,
shortened filenames on avi-file output produced by the video preprocessing module.

For the other separate issue of 800 MB input video resulting in 6 GM output video, I am moving it to a separate discussion. See discussion #322.