The Video Document.PDF

The metaphor of film and TV permeates the design of software to support video on the PC. Simply transplanting the noninteractive, sequential experience of film to the PC fails to exploit the virtues of the new context. Video on the PC should be interactive and non-sequential. This paper experiments with a variety of tools for using video on the PC that exploits the new context of the PC. Some features are more successful than others. Applications that use these tools are explored, including primarily the home video archive but also streaming video servers on the Internet. The ability to browse, edit, abstract and index large volumes of video content such as home video and corporate video is a problem without appropriate solution in today’s market. The current tools available are complex, unfriendly (professional) video editors, requiring hours of work to prepare a short home video, far more work that a typical home user can be expected to provide. Our proposed solution treats video like a text document, providing functionality similar to a text editor. Users can browse, interact, edit and compose one or more video sequences with the same ease and convenience as handling text documents. With this level of text-like composition, we call what is normally a sequential medium a “video document”. An important component of the proposed solution is shot detection, the ability to detect when a shot started or stopped. When combined with a spreadsheet of key frames, the shots become a grid of pictures that can be manipulated and viewed in the same way that a spreadsheet can be edited. Multiple video documents may be viewed, joined, manipulated, and seamlessly played back. Abstracts of unedited video content can be produced automatically to create novel video content for export to other venues. Edited and raw video content can be published to the net or burned to a CD-ROM with a self-installing viewer for Windows 98 and Windows NT 4. 0.