SIGGRAPH 2012 - Day 3

Today I will focus solely on the video processing session. First, the eulerian video magnification really demonstrated a fundamental gap in my knowledge of signal processing. I like to operate by having an intuition of how every part of a system will behave once we start introducing changes or stresses, and working in the frequency domain is one of those places that still seems like magic to me (and in this case magic is a bad thing).

The paper on selectively deanimating video (see their webpage) resulted in incredibly cool cinemagraphs with very little user effort. While there are still a number of subtle artifacts that I would still remove if doing this work by hand, going from several hours of expert compositing to under a minute of untrained user interaction is a fantastic reduction of complexity. I am certainly inspired to break out some footage I shot a few weeks ago for this very purpose and give it another try.

Finally, the paper on seamless cuts of interview footage (see their video) was very conflicting. The technique is very smart and has absolutely stunning results, but the honest filmmaker in me (not just the general filmmaker, mind you) is absolutely appalled that this tool exists. Unless this becomes accessible to the general public (which it is not in the current incarnation) and therefore always in consideration when watching edited interviews, it exists to convince an audience that a third party interviewee is speaking within a context that is completely artificial. You don't have to take someone out of context anymore in order to twist their words, you can do it right in front of the viewers face without blinking.