Virtual videography

Well-produced videos provide a convenient and effective way to archive lectures. In this demonstration, we present a new way to create lecture videos that possess many of the advantages of well-composed recordings without the cost and intrusion of a video production crew. The videos are produced by an automated system called Virtual Videography that employs the art of videography to mimic videographer-produced videos, while being unobtrusive when recording the lectures. The system uses the data recorded by unattended video cameras and microphones to produce a new edited video as an offline post-process. By producing videos offline, our system can use future information when planning shot sequences and synthesizing new shots. Using 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.