Generating Flight Summaries Conforming to Cinematographic Principles

Abstract

We propose an automatic method for generating flight summaries of prescribed duration, given any planed 3D trajectory of a flying object. The challenge is to select relevant time-ellipses, while keeping and adequately framing the most interesting parts of the trajectory, and enforcing cinematographic rules between the selected shots. Our solution optimizes the visual quality of the output video both in terms of camera view and film editing choices, thanks to a new optimization technique, designed to jointly optimize the selection of the interesting parts of a flight, and the camera animation parameters over time. To our best knowledge, this solution is the first one to address camera control, film editing, and trajectory summarizing at once. Ablation studies demonstrate the visual quality of the flights summaries we generate compared to alternative methods.