In video production, inserting B-roll is a widely used technique to enrich the story and make a video more engaging. However, determining the right content and positions of B-roll and actually inserting it within the main footage can be challenging, and novice producers often struggle to get both timing and content right. We present B-Script, a system that supports B-roll video editing via interactive transcripts. B-Script has a built-in recommendation system trained on expert-annotated data, recommending users B-roll position and content. To evaluate the system, we conducted a within-subject user study with 110 participants, and compared three interface variations: a timeline-based editor, a transcript-based editor, and a transcript-based editor with recommendations. Users found it easier and were faster to insert B-roll using the transcript-based interface, and they created more engaging videos when recommendations were provided.
We present QuickCut, an interactive video editing tool designed to help authors efficiently edit narrated video. QuickCut takes an audio recording of the narration voiceover and a collection of raw video footage as input. Users then review the raw footage and provide spoken annotations describing the relevant actions and objects in the scene. QuickCut time-aligns a transcript of the annotations with the raw footage and a transcript of the narration to the voiceover. These aligned transcripts enable authors to quickly match story events in the narration with semantically relevant video segments and form alignment constraints between them. Given a set of such constraints, QuickCut applies dynamic programming optimization to choose frame-level cut points between the video segments while maintaining alignments with the narration and adhering to low-level film editing guidelines. We demonstrate QuickCut's effectiveness by using it to generate a variety of short (less than 2 minutes) narrated videos. Each result required between 14 and 52 minutes of user time to edit (i.e. between 8 and 31 minutes for each minute of output video), which is far less than typical authoring times with existing video editing workflows. Video production is a collaborative process in which stakeholders regularly review drafts of the edited video to indicate problems and offer suggestions for improvement. Although practitioners prefer in-person feedback, most reviews are conducted asynchronously via email due to scheduling and location constraints. The use of this impoverished medium is challenging for both providers and consumers of feedback. We introduce VidCrit, a system for providing asynchronous feedback on drafts of edited video that incorporates favorable qualities of an in-person review. This system consists of two separate interfaces: (1) A feedback recording interface captures reviewers' spoken comments, mouse interactions, hand gestures and other physical reactions. (2) A feedback viewing interface transcribes and segments the recorded review into topical comments so that the video author can browse the review by either text or timelines. Our system features novel methods to automatically segment a long review session into topical text comments, and to label such comments with additional contextual information. We interviewed practitioners to inform a set of design guidelines for giving and receiving feedback, and based our system's design on these guidelines. Video reviewers using our system preferred our feedback recording interface over email for providing feedback due to the reduction in time and effort. In a fixed amount of time, reviewers provided 10.9 (σ=5.09) more local comments than when using text. All video authors rated our feedback viewing interface preferable to receiving feedback via e-mail. Blackboard-style lecture videos are popular, but learning using existing video player interfaces can be challenging. Viewers cannot consume the lecture material at their own pace, and the content is also difficult to search or skim. For these reasons, some people prefer lecture notes to videos. To address these limitations, we present Visual Transcripts, a readable representation of lecture videos that combines visual information with transcript text. To generate a Visual Transcript, we first segment the visual content of a lecture into discrete visual entities that correspond to equations, figures, or lines of text. Then, we analyze the temporal correspondence between the transcript and visuals to determine how sentences relate to visual entities. Finally, we arrange the text and visuals in a linear layout based on these relationships. We compare our result with a standard video player, and a state-of-the-art interface designed specifically for blackboard-style lecture videos. User evaluation suggests that users prefer our interface for learning and that our interface is effective in helping them browse or search through lecture videos.