Tools for Placing Cuts and Transitions in Interview Video
Floraine Berthouzoz, Wilmot Li, Maneesh Agrawala
Abstract
We present a set of tools designed to help editors place cuts and create transitions in interview video. To help place cuts, our interface links a text transcript of the video to the corresponding locations in the raw footage. It also visualizes the suitability of cut locations by analyzing the audio/visual features of the raw footage to find frames where the speaker is relatively quiet and still. With these tools editors can directly highlight segments of text, check if the endpoints are suitable cut locations and if so, simply delete the text to make the edit. For each cut our system generates visible (e.g. jump-cut, fade, etc.) and seamless, hidden transitions.We present a hierarchical, graph-based algorithm for efficiently generating hidden transitions that considers visual features specific to interview footage. We also describe a new data-driven technique for setting the timing of the hidden transition. Finally, our tools offer a one click method for seamlessly removing ’ums’ and repeated words as well as inserting natural-looking pauses to emphasize semantic content. We apply our tools to edit a variety of interviews and also show how they can be used to quickly compose multiple takes of an actor narrating a story.
Our interface. Selecting text in the transcript highlights corresponding regions of the timeline. Vertical bars in the transcript and blue bars in the timeline visualize cut suitability; places where a cut is least likely to interrupt the flow of the video.
Research Paper
Video