Towards Virtual Videography

Videographers have developed an art of conveying events in video. Through choices made in cinematography, editing, and post-processing, effective video presentations can be created from events recorded with little or no intrusion. In this paper, we explore systems that bring videography to situations where cost or time issues preclude application of the art. Our goal is to develop virtual videography, that is, systems that can help automate the process of creating an effective video presentation from given footage. In this paper, we discuss how virtual videography systems can be constructed by combining image-based rendering to synthetically generate shots with image understanding to help choose what should be shown to the viewer. To this, visual effects can be added to enhance the presentation, lessening the degradation caused by the medium.