Tuesday 18 September 2007

Time-compressing video

I recently linked to a fascinating video on image resizing. I think the same concept could be applied to video, not just to resize individual frames, but to shrink the whole thing time-wise into a more compact form.

Imagine a video as a translucent 3-D block on your desk. You see the frames as they change over time. Now, to time-compress the block, you find a wavy plane that cuts the block from one side to the other at the "least interesting" point. It will encompass the least detailed and most static portions of the block as defined by the "energy function". By applying this "curved frame" deletion many times, we can time-shrink a video to re-target it at audiences with shorter attention spans.

Compressed too far, it will start to lose some more important information, of course, the same way seam-carved retargeted images lose information when shrunk too far. I have also not addressed the issue of sound, which is tricky, because the sound portion to discard for a curved frame is not clear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Titanic could have used this.
PPS - And Marie Antoinette, too.

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