Simplifying Video Editing with Intelligent Interaction

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. In this paper, we describe several visualization and interaction techniques that use video metadata, including a transcript, to mitigate the problems of editing in this domain. We implemented these techniques in Silver, an authoring tool designed to make it easier for novice users to edit video. 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 intelligent 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 system. Participants successfully edited video after only a short tutorial, both with and without intelligent 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.