Comment on Viki playback speeds, image controls, and search screens
I have reviewed the use of video playback speeds in various services. YouTube uses 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0 but it is not sufficient. I have experimented with speeds from 1/100 to 100x or faster. Rather than a fixed set of speeds, an intelligent assistant can help.
For action movies, they have a lot of footage showing at 30 frames per second or faster. Frame by frame is a good option any time. On the Internet there are things like lightning, explosions, collisions, where it is helpful to slow down to one frame each minute, giving the viewer time to absorb and learn each frame closely. I have experimented with scanning movies showing only a frame from each minute, and different visualizations to show whole movies in a single chart of intensities and colors, voice and music.
NASA.gov, NOAA.gov and similar sites will show years of solar images as a timed sequence of images. A “video” is just a collection of images shown at a given rate.
If you want to really make the images useful to viewers, you should also consider controls on zoom, measurement, intensity. Many movies are too dark. The producer/editor chooses something for effect, and they make a bad viewing experience for the users.
If you watch any of the thousands of live videos on the Internet now, you will see some have very long times archived. The YouTube live videos (most of them) have the last 12 hours. I have experimented with different rates. If you watch an animal feeding webcamera, you might want to scan one frame out of 1800 (the first frame, then a frame at one minute, a frame at two minutes) to locate the parts where there is something to see.
Many of the frames in movies and webcams are of poor quality. There are algorithms to improve quality by registering and stacking the frames to clean them up and to improve resolution and viewing.
This is not directly relate to frame speed or presentation control, but you might want to consider other ways of presenting lists of videos. You have a lot of them in your database and available. but when the number goes over a few dozen, then browsing large images in blocks on the screen is very hard for humans to read and understand. You could add “filters” or criteria and allow people control over the kinds and content of the screens they see as they browse or search.
On the Internet as a whole, the use of videos and other image and data sequences if exploding in popularity – not just for entertainment, but for research, education, visualization and learning. You really do not have scientific videos or videos of natural things or live videos yet. There is a lot more that can be done with them, than just be locked into one persons arbitrary choice of viewing speed, color controls, and visualizations of the what is contained in the images.
I have also been tracking the various artificial intelligence, machine vision, machine intelligence, video tagging, video classification, and related activities on the Internet. There are ways to search for things in images (single or sequences) where things happen. “Show me only outdoor scenes from this movie where there is lots of sky”, “show me only the scenes where (this actor or actress) is in the scene” – the possibilities are infinite.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
