DuctTake: Seam-Based Video Compositing

We describe in detail the required components, decisions, and new techniques that together make a usable, interactive tool for compositing HD video, paying special attention to running time and performance of each section.

DuctTake is a system designed to enable practical compositing of multiple takes of a scene into a single video. Current industry solutions are based around object segmentation, a hard problem that requires extensive manual input and cleanup, making compositing an expensive part of the film-making process. Our method instead composites shots together by finding optimal spatiotemporal seams using motion compensated 3D graph cuts through the video volume. We describe in detail the required components, decisions, and new techniques that together make a usable, interactive tool for compositing HD video, paying special attention to running time and performance of each section. We validate our approach by presenting a wide variety if examples and by comparing result quality and creation time to composites made by professional artists using current state-of-the-art tools.