Coolest video-editing toys I've seen in a long time...

[jducoeur]

Thanks to Aaron for the pointer to this remarkable little movie from Adobe. Suffice it to say, they figured out a reasonably simple and elegant mechanism for object-tracking in video -- and then started playing with what you can do with that technology. "Graffiti" that tracks objects in the video; drag-and-drop manipulation of the video timeline; even quick and easy video fumetti.

If Adobe doesn't commercialize this quickly, they're fools. The techies and artists would *love* this stuff: if the tool operates as illustrated, it brings a lot of clever and useful power to the end user. I'd bet good money that they'd see a million downloads of the tool in a week, and it would probably become a routine tool for the YouTube crowd. (And if they opened up the back end properly, I suspect that folks would quickly come up with a hundred more applications...)

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Hmm, aside from all the other neat possibilities, it seems like that aspect would make it a lot easier to use representative video as template for generated content. E.g. you could record a sampler of positions for a video game avatar, and much more naturally composite them into movement over various terrain than is currently feasible.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"a lot easier to use representative video as template for generated content"

True. You could get a very interesting art-form which blends the differences between live-action and animation. You could have live actors do a performance, but then have the control-freak director fine-tune them in post! (As a sometime control-freak director myself, I salivate.)

"positions for a video game avatar, and much more naturally composite them into movement"

That, not so much, I think. At least not without even more significant breakthroughs in the technology. It's not my specific area of expertise, but I know enough to know that game animation is Hard, and computational methods of generating it are still of very limited utility.