Interactive media and design editing for live visuals applications

This paper describes novel concepts for the interactive composition of artistic real-time graphics, so-called live visuals. By establishing two fundamental techniques dealing with the structured media integration and the intrinsic design process, we significantly increase the efficiency of interactive editing in live visuals applications. First, we present a media manager that supports the user in both retrieval and utilization of automatically annotated digital media. The computer-assisted application of individual media items permits the interactive control of non-linear editing (NLE) of video in real-time. Second, we optimize the design process by introducing the design tree, which collects and organizes the artist’s work in an intuitive way. Design tree operations provide interactive high-level editing methods which allow for exploration, combination, reuse, and evolution of designs before and particularly during the performance. We examined the effectiveness of our techniques on numerous long-lasting live performances from which representative examples are demonstrated.