UiB to participate in world-leading media innovation project

“Using existing tools, the workflow to produce quality video is cumbersome and complicated. The process from idea to publication includes a multitude of tools for scripting, recording audio and video, editing, insertion of subtitles and graphics for publication in different channels, both in new media and traditional broadcasting. The tools are expensive and require specialized knowledge among users,” says Marius Monsen, global head of UX at Vizrt.

The project has been named Better Video Workflows via Real-Time Collaboration and AI Techniques in Television and New Media.

A showcase for the social sciences

The new tool at the centre of the project is being developed in a collaboration between Vizrt and the University of Bergen (UiB) and is supported by the Research Council of Norway through the Brukerstyrt innovasjonsarena (BIA) programme. The collaboration points towards the August 2017 opening of the media and knowledge cluster Media City Bergen (MCB). Both Vizrt and UiB will be present here alongside other partners from the media and media technology industries.

“This is a major project that provides UiB and its Media City Bergen partners a unique opportunity to develop and do research on the media technology of the future,” says UiB's Rector Dag Rune Olsen and adds:

Strengthening innovative research in Bergen

The interaction research group at UiB's Department of Information Science and Media Studies are Vizrt's research partners in the project. The group studies the interaction between information systems and users.

Department head Leif Ove Larsen is delighted with the award.

“We greatly appreciate being a research partner on an innovation project of this size. With two PhD candidates associated with the project, we develop expertise in media technology, and we facilitate capacity-building for the long term. Not only is it a wonderful project to strengthen collaboration between UiB and Vizrt, it is also an important contribution to building a media cluster in Bergen,” says Larsen.

A tool to cut production costs

The project seeks to lower the barriers and costs of producing and publishing quality video. The project will have a high degree of user participation and the researchers involved will study how quality video production takes place in broadcasting.

“The support from the Research Council of Norway enables us to have a long-term commitment in areas we otherwise would not have the capacity or budget to do this, especially in developing artificial intelligence (AI) and analysis of the workflow of contemporary use of video editing tools,” says Monsen from Vizrt.

New researchers with innovative focus

The two new ph.d. positions at UiB will each have a different focus as part of the innovation project. One will examine how to use techniques from AI to create a better workflow in the video tool Viz Story, the other will look at how cloud-based collaborative video editing can be supported by Viz Story.

“The university has relevant expertise in interaction design, AI, and Human computer-interaction (HCI). We are particularly interested in research into finding the best method for the use of AI and collaborative editing,” says Associate Professor Frode Guribye from the Department of Information Science and Media Studies.

“We know that there are some challenges with real-time editing of multi-user editors. This also applies for collaborative editing and we have planned a number of case studies around this. There is also room to try to find other uses for these technologies. Another challenge will be to find the right balance between simplicity, complexity and flexibility of this type of tool.”