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Easy-to-use audio/video authoring tools play a crucial role in moving multimedia programs from research curiosity to mainstream applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of an interactive video authoring system called Zodiac, which employs an innovative edit history abstraction to support several unique editing features not found in existing commercial and research video editing systems. Zodiac provides users a conceptually clean and semantically powerful branching history model of edit operations to organize the authoring process, and to navigate among the design alternatives. In addition, by analyzing the edit history, Zodiac is able to reliably detect a composed stream's shot and scene boundaries, which facilitate interactive video browsing. Zodiac also features a video object annotation capability that allows users to associate annotations to moving objects in a video sequence. The annotations themselves could be text, image, audio, or video. Zodiac is built on top of MMFS, a le system speciically designed for interactive multimedia development environments, and implements an internal buuer manager that supports transparent lossless compression/decompression. Shot/scene detection, video object annotation, and buuer management all exploit the edit history information for performance optimization.