Section: New Results

Automatic Continuity Editing for 3-D Animation

Participants : Marc Christie, Quentin Galvane, Christophe Lino.

We have proposed an optimization-based approach for automatically creating movies from 3-D animation. The method nicely separates the work of the virtual cinematographer (placing cameras and lights to produce nice-looking views of the action) from the work of the virtual film editor (cutting and pasting shots from all available cameras). While previous work has mostly focused on the first problem, the second problem has never been addressed in full details. We have reviewed the main causes of editing errors and built a cost function for minimizing them. We made a plausible semi-Markov assumption, which results in a computationally efficient dynamic programming solution. We showed that our method generates movies that avoid many common errors in film editing, including jump cuts, continuity errors and non-motivated cuts. We also show that our method can generate movies with different pacings. Combined with state-of-the-art cinematography, our approach therefore promises to significantly extend the expressiveness and naturalness of virtual movie-making. The work has been published at AAAI [27] . More details comparisons have been performed in [26] .