Cliplets: Juxtaposing still and dynamic imagery

Cliplets: Juxtaposing still and dynamic imagery
Neel Joshi, Sisil Mehta, Steven Drucker, Eric Stollnitz, Hugues Hoppe, Matt Uyttendaele, Michael Cohen.
Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2012. (Best Paper Award.)
Cinemagraphs and more general spatiotemporal compositions from handheld video.
Abstract: We explore creating cliplets, a form of visual media that juxtaposes still image and video segments, both spatially and temporally, to expressively abstract a moment. Much as in cinemagraphs, the tension between static and dynamic elements in a cliplet reinforces both aspects, strongly focusing the viewer's attention. Creating this type of imagery is challenging without professional tools and training. We develop a set of idioms, essentially spatiotemporal mappings, that characterize cliplet elements, and use these idioms in an interactive system to quickly compose a cliplet from ordinary handheld video. One difficulty is to avoid artifacts in the cliplet composition without resorting to extensive manual input. We address this with automatic alignment, looping optimization and feathering, simultaneous matting and compositing, and Laplacian blending. A key user-interface challenge is to provide affordances to define the parameters of the mappings from input time to output time while maintaining a focus on the cliplet being created. We demonstrate the creation of a variety of cliplet types. We also report on informal feedback as well as a more structured survey of users.
Hindsights:

With cliplets, the user interactively sketches static and dynamic regions, each assigned a uniform looping period. Our subsequent work Automated video looping animates the entire scene without user assistance, and uses combinatorial optimization to infer the optimal looping interval for each pixel.

See some nice professionally created cinemagraphs at https://cinemagraphs.com/.