Video composition by the crowd: a system to compose user-generated videos in near real-time

Abstract

To compose high-quality movies directors need life-long learning and talent. User-generated video defines a new era of video production in which non-professionals record videos and share them on platforms such as YouTube. As hiring professional directors results in high costs, our work focuses on replacing those directors by crowdsourcing. The proposed system allows users to record and stream live videos to servers on which workers create a video mashup. A smartphone application for recording live video has been designed that supports the composition in the crowd by a multi-modal analysis of the recording quality. The contributions of this work are: The proposed system demonstrates that composing a large number of video views can be achieved in near real-time. Second, the system achieves comparable video quality for user-generated video in comparison to manual composition. Third, it offers insights on how to design real-time capable crowdsourcing systems. Fourth, by leveraging multi-modal features that can already be evaluated during recording the number of streams considered for presentation can be reduced.