Semantic Mastering: content adaptation in the creative drama production workflow

In order to provide audiences with a proper universal multimedia experience, all classes of media consumption devices, from high definition displays to mobile media players, must receive a product that is not only adapted to their capabilities and usage environments, but also conveys the semantics and cinematography behind the narrative in an optimal way. This paper introduces a semantic video adaptation system that incorporates the media adaptation process in the center of the drama production process. Producers, directors and other creative staff instruct the semantic adaptation system using common cinematographic terminology and vocabulary, thereby seamlessly extending the drama production process into the realm of content adaptation. The multitude of production metadata obtained from various steps in the production process provides a valuable context of narrative semantics that is exploited by the adaptation process. As such, high definition imagery can be intelligently adapted to smaller resolutions while optimally fulfilling the filmmaker’s dramatic intentions with respect to the original narrative and obeying various rules of cinematographic grammar.