Digital video is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. However, editing video remains difficult for several reasons: it is a time-based medium, it has dual tracks of audio and video, and current tools force users to work at the smallest level of detail. Based on interviews with professional video editors, we developed a video editor, called Silver, that uses metadata to make digital video editing more accessible to novices. To help users visualize video, Silver provides multiple views with different semantic content and at different levels of abstraction, including storyboard, editable transcript, and timeline views. Silver offers smart editing operations that help users resolve the inconsistencies that arise because of the different boundaries in audio and video. We conducted a preliminary user study to investigate the effectiveness of the Silver smart editing. Participants successfully edited video after only a short tutorial, both with and without smart editing assistance. Our research suggests several ways in which video editing tools could use metadata to assist users in the reuse and composition of video.

It is difficult to interact with computer displays that are across the room. A popular approach is to use laser pointers tracked by a camera, but interaction techniques using laser pointers tend to be imprecise, error-prone, and slow. Although many previous papers discuss laser pointer interaction techniques, none seem to have performed user studies to help inform the design. This paper reports on two studies of laser pointer interactions that answer some of the questions related to interacting with objects using a laser pointer. The first experiment evaluates various parameters of laser pointers. For example, the time to acquire a target is about 1 second, and the jitter due to hand unsteadiness is about ±8 pixels, which can be reduced to about ±2 to ±4 pixels by filtering. We compared 7 different ways to hold various kinds of laser pointers, and found that a laser pointer built into a PalmOS device was the most stable. The second experiment compared 4 different ways to select objects on a large projected display. We found that tapping directly on a wall-size SmartBoard was the fastest and most accurate method, followed by a new interaction technique that copies the area of interest from the big screen to a handheld. Third in speed was the conventional mouse, and the laser pointer came in last, with a time almost twice as long as tapping on the SmartBoard.

Digital video is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. However, editing video remains difficult for several reasons: it is a time-based medium, it has dual tracks of audio and video, and current tools force users to work at the smallest level of detail. Based on interviews with professional video editors, we developed a video editor, called Silver, that uses metadata to make digital video editing more accessible to novices. To help users visualize video, Silver provides multiple views with different semantic content and at different levels of abstraction, including storyboard, editable transcript, and timeline views. Silver offers smart editing operations that help users resolve the inconsistencies that arise because of the different boundaries in audio and video.