The Editblog

The current video of the moment making the rounds for professional video editors, compositors and effects artists is a little technology preview from Adobe’s Creative Technologies Lab called interactive video object manipulation. Their description says it best: “This demo illustrates our research to bring interactivity to video editing: Our system analyzes videos using computer vision techniques, enabling interactive annotation, browsing, and even drag-and-drop composition of new still images using video footage.” It’s pretty cool technology that allows a form of motion tracking and manipulation of the video that as of today is only possible through some heavy duty software like … Adobe’s After Effects!

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

Will something like this put After Effects out of business? Of course not, but if this type of thing ships for real and en masse then we could certainly expect a lot of bad motion tracking popping up from local car commercials to You Tube and beyond. To me, the most intriguing aspect of technology like this is to see how it would be implemented in professional level products. If there’s a simple implementation and interface dropped into a consumer level application like Adobe Premiere Elements then it would seem natural that they would drop a heavy-duty pro version into Premiere Pro or After Effects. It reminds me of another video that make the round a few months ago Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene.

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

Not surprisingly, both of these technologies were developed with the help of the University of Washington. Whatever they do it’s just another example of technology marching along and bringing things that were once done only by dedicated professionals with years of training on expensive hardware to anyone with a video camera and a computer. So is this a good or a bad thing for the art of film and video and our profession in general? That’s a debate and a discussion for another day.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 am and is filed under Blogs and links, filmmaking, from the net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.