Analyzing real-world events captured in video is often a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process. This paper describes Video Assist, a software tool designed to assist encoding and analyzing actions recorded on video tape. It presents the design rationales underlying its features such as: customizable objects and their attributes, their integration with an outliner and timeline diagrams, their directly manipulable interface, and its mechanism for supporting consistent labeling. It reports on the use of this tool in analyzing a software review process meeting recorded on video tape. Using this example, it illustrates how Video Assist implements the phases and the operations of ESDA (Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis) and how they can dramatically simplify the process of analyzing the sequential data in video. It concludes by discussing the current limitations of the tool and the plans for future extension.