Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 2, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This "intelligent" algorithm is even supposed to edit the film meaningfully: it observes important rules of film editing such as the 180-degree rule, avoids jump cuts and ensures that the interesting and relevant action is at the centre. This naturally leaves the creative aspiration of an editor behind, since the most sophisticated cuts (for example, the violation of the 180-degree rule in Kubrick’s "The Shining") arise precisely through such violations of the rules. Nevertheless, this development can help with the preselection of clips and editors can assemble a quick orientation clip.
To realise this, the program creates a spatial model from the video material with the different perspectives, including the camera positions and shooting directions. The tool also automatically selects the best-quality clips.
The computation process currently still takes several hours. The published video also includes a comparison between a cut by a professional editor and the automatic edit by the Disney Research program. The tool is certainly not so forward-looking for the final cut in the professional film sector, but it could be interesting for social-media platforms or amateur filmmakers.
All further information about the Disney Research algorithm can be found here.
