A computer implemented method for automatically identifying shot changes in a video sequence in real-time or near-real-time is disclosed. Optical flow energy change differences between frames, sum-of-square differences between optical-flow-compensated frames, and hue histogram changes within frames are analyzed and stored in frame buffers. A feature vector formed from a combination of these measurements is compared to a feature vector formed from thresholds based on tunable recall and precision to declare the presence or absence of a shot change.