CONSUMER
Scientist puts Hollywood in a handheld
26-11-2002
by
At a Media Lab Europe event on Tuesday, a professor from UC Berkeley unveiled details of a new set of software tools that could turn anyone into a movie editor.
Dr Marc Davis, an assistant professor with University of California, Berkeley, spoke in Dublin about his research into the development of a suite of software tools that should, within the next five years, give users the ability to create high-quality digital films quickly and easily. The details of this new technology were revealed at Media Lab Europe's iCast event, part of a series of lectures and demonstrations on new media technologies.
Speaking with ElectricNews.Net, Davis described the software that he has been working on for over a decade, first at the MIT Media Lab and now at Berkeley. By reinventing what he calls "the paradigm of media production and consumption," his new technology could effectively allow any consumer to make short movies in minutes, with little or no work.
One instance of this paradigm is the way that home movies typically have low production values, but people watch them because of their high salience, or personal meaning. Conversely, Hollywood films have high production values but low salience. "In other words you watch home movies because you care about the people in them, not because they are high-quality," Davis said. "We want to change this around."
Essentially, this process means that direction, cinematography and editing -- difficult and sometimes arduous tasks in movie-making -- could be fully automated using Davis' software, which is currently called Media Streams. This automation is performed using so-called media metadata, a way to tag video sequences so that computers can understand the content of a video in terms of who or what is on a film, when the film was shot and what significance the clip has to the user.
This system, on which the upcoming MPEG-7 standard has been partially based, puts in place a kind of video editing language that both computers and users can easily understand, thereby simplifying the editing process. "We want people to be able to create movies of themselves that have Hollywood-like quality, but can be made in five minutes on a device about the size of a remote control," Davis said.
Davis equates the new software to Broderbund's early incarnations of Print Shop software, which in the mid-1980s effectively launched desktop publishing by allowing consumers to make cards, pictures and banners at home. "Before Print Shop, publishing was too difficult for most people. The same is true of movie editing now. There is nothing out there that makes it easy for someone to create high-quality movies."
Davis' technology will be used mainly in the production of short video clips that can be quickly sent over a broadband network. He said that when he initially began work in the field, most hardware was not up to the task of allowing users to easily shoot digital films. "The hardware has come a long way, and the software could be ready [for a commercial launch] between three and ten years from now, with five years our target," Davis said.
Prototypes of digital cameras loaded with Media Streams have been built, Davis said, and his company, Amova, holds many of the patents to the technology.
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