Do-it-yourself lighting design for product videography

Abstract

The growth of online marketplaces for selling goods has increased the need for product photography by novice users and consumers. Additionally, the increased use of online media and large-screen billboards promotes the adoption of videos for advertising, going beyond just using still imagery. Lighting is a key distinction between professional and casual product videography. Professionals use specialized hardware setups, and bring expert skills to create good lighting that shows off the product's shape and material, while also producing aesthetically pleasing results. In this paper, we introduce a new do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to lighting design that lets novice users create studio quality product videography. We identify design principles to light products through emphasizing highlights, rim lighting, and contours. We devise a set of computational metrics to achieve these design goals. Our workflow is: the user acquires a video of the product by mounting a video camera on a tripod and using a tablet to light objects by waving the tablet around the object. We automatically analyze and split this acquired video into snippets that match our design principles. Finally, we present an interface that lets users easily select snippets with specific characteristics and then assembles them to produce a final pleasing video of the product. Alternatively, they can rely on our template mechanism to automatically assemble a video.