Adobe Demoes 'Interactive Video Object Manipulation'

Author	Hugo Jobling
Published	1st Dec 2008

Adobe Demoes 'Interactive Video Object Manipulation'

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I've seen some pretty neat video editing applications in my time, but not many compare to a demonstration of what Adobe's Dan Goldman calls "Interactive Video Object Manipulation." The simple premise: allowing some really quite complicated effects to be added to videos with almost no effort on the end users part.

Click to enlarge

One example includes adding speech or thought bubbles to people in a video, which then track their position on screen. If that doesn't float your boat, how about adding graffiti effects to a moving object writing, say, taxi on the side of a taxi? Or if adding stuff to a video doesn't do it for you, maybe being able to drag objects around within a video either to navigate through, or compose still images with?

It all works using a nifty processing technique that covers each object in the video with hundreds, if not thousands of 'points', calculates what objects those belong to and then tracks them across each frame. Goldman says the system isn't entirely perfect, but that it's "good enough" - a statement clearly backed up by the demonstration in Adobe After Effects.

This really is a matter of you have to see it to believe it, to which end here's a video showcasing the tech.

Hopefully Adobe and the University of Washington, with which the project has been jointly researched, will make this available as a plug-in soon! I really, really want to have a play!

Link:
Adobe.