Simplifying Video Editing Using Metadata

Digital video is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. However, editing video remains difficult for several reasons: it is a time-based medium, it has dual tracks of audio and video, and current tools force users to work at the smallest level of detail. Based on interviews with professional video editors, we developed a video editor, called Silver, that uses metadata to make digital video editing more accessible to novices. To help users visualize video, Silver provides multiple views with different semantic content and at different levels of abstraction, including storyboard, editable transcript, and timeline views. Silver offers smart editing operations that help users resolve the inconsistencies that arise because of the different boundaries in audio and video. We conducted a preliminary user study to investigate the effectiveness of the Silver smart editing. Participants successfully edited video after only a short tutorial, both with and without smart editing assistance. Our research suggests several ways in which video editing tools could use metadata to assist users in the reuse and composition of video.