<title>Description scheme for video editing work</title>

Abstract

This article presents a Description Scheme (DS) to describe the audio-visual documents from the video editing work point of view. This DS is based on edition techniques used in the video edition domain. The main objective of this DS is to provide a complete, modular and extensible description of the structure of the video documents based on editing process. This VideoEditing DS is generic in the sense that it may be used in a large number of applications such as video document indexing and analysis, description of Edit Decision List and elaboration of editing patterns. It is based on accurate and complete definitions of shots and transition effects required for video document analysis applications. The VideoEditing DS allows three levels of description : analytic, synthetic and semantic. In the DS, the higher (resp. the lower) is the element of description, the more analytic (resp. synthetic) is the information. %Phil This DS allows describing the editing work made by editing boards, using more detailed descriptors of Shots and Transition DSs. These elements are provided to define editing patterns that allow several possible reconstructions of movies depending on, for example, the target audience. A part of the video description made with this DS may be automatically produced by the video to shots segmentation algorithms (analytic DSs ) or by editing software, at the same time the edition work is made. This DS gives an answer to the needs related to the exchange of editing work descriptions between editing softwares. At the same time, the same DS provide an analytic description of editing work which is complementary to existing standards for Edit Decision Lists like SMPTE or AAF.