Paper Info
Title
A semi-automatic approach to home video editing
Abstract
Hitchcock is a system that allows users to easily create cus- tom videos from raw video shot with a standard video cam- era. In contrast to other video editing systems, Hitchcock uses automatic analysis to determine the suitability of por- tions of the raw video. Unsuitable video typically has fast or erratic camera motion. Hitchcock first analyzes video to identify the type and amount of camera motion: fast pan, slow zoom, etc. Based on this analysis, a numerical "unsuit- ability" score is computed for each frame of the video. Combined with standard editing rules, this score is used to identify clips for inclusion in the final video and to select their start and end points. To create a custom video, the user drags keyframes corresponding to the desired clips into a storyboard. Users can lengthen or shorten the clip without specifying the start and end frames explicitly. Clip lengths are balanced automatically using a spring-based algorithm. In this paper, we describe a new approach for addressing the problems non-professionals have in using existing video editing tools. Our approach is to provide the user with an interactive system for composing video that does not require manual selection of the start and end points for each video clip. The system analyzes the video to identify suitable clips, and a set of editing rules is applied to select the initial length of each clip. The user can then select clips, adjust their lengths, and determine the order in which they will be shown. This process may be divided into several steps: The video is first analyzed to determine camera motion and speed. Bad video is typically characterized by fast or erratic camera motion. Motion analysis is used to find segments of the video, or clips, that are suitable for inclusion in the final video. A keyframe for each suitable clip is displayed to the user. We provide an interface that allows the user to browse quickly through the keyframes of the entire raw video. The user then selects the desired keyframes and organizes them in a storyboard. Hitchcock creates the final video automatically by concate- nating the selected clips. Editing rules are used to optimize the length of each clip to be included. These rules represent the experience of a professional video producer and embody heuristics about clip duration and transitions. After review- ing the automatically generated video, the user can use the storyboard interface to lengthen or shorten the individual clips in cases where the rules yielded unwanted results. We conducted a user study in which we gave DV cameras to the participants to shoot some home video and had them edit the video with Hitchcock. The study was completed very recently so that only a few preliminary results are reported in this paper. In the next section, we discuss designs of video editing sys- tems that use different levels of automation. After that, we describe our approach for extracting clips from a video. We then present a user interface that supports semi-automatic video editing: the system offers a collection of clips that the user can select, adjust in length, and place in a desired order. We conclude with a discussion of the use of a spring-based
Year
DOI
Venue
2000
10.1145/354401.354415
UIST
Keywords
Field
DocType
video editing,automatic video clip extraction,video analysis,home video editing,semi-automatic approach,video exploration,user interface
Video processing,Video capture,Computer graphics (images),Computer science,Multiview Video Coding,Post-production,Non-linear editing system,Video tracking,Video editing,Smacker video,Multimedia
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-212-3
86
7.73
References 
Authors
13
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andreas Girgensohn11724185.73
John Boreczky259951.87
Patrick Chiu315721.64
John Doherty411311.89
Jonathan Foote51625176.16
Gene Golovchinsky61335134.41
Shingo Uchihashi743141.70
Lynn Wilcox81330180.16