Virtual videography

Abstract

Well-produced videos provide a convenient and effective way to archive lectures. In this article, we offer a new way to create lecture videos that retains many of the advantages of well-composed recordings, without the cost and intrusion of a video production crew. We present an automated system called Virtual Videography that employs the art of videography to mimic videographer-produced videos, while unobtrusively recording lectures. The system uses the data recorded by unattended video cameras and microphones to produce a new edited video as an offline postprocess. By producing videos offline, our system can use future information when planning shot sequences and synthesizing new shots. Using simple syntactic cues gathered from the original video and a novel shot planning algorithm, the system makes cinematic decisions without any semantic understanding of the lecture.