Avid Technology Limited

Daniel Desbois

Michael Chilton Sheasby

Francis A Capria

Stephane R Harnois

Min Wei

Sylvain G Moreau

Thomas G Fincher

Eric Forget

Alan Swartz

Richard Gratton

Shailendra Mathur

Rejean Gagne

Thomas P Nadas

Michel Gangnet

Luis Talavera

Peter Ibrahim

Marc-Andre Decoste

Jean-Claude Bouchard

Nicholas M Michaud

Thomas Krul

A Michael Mondry

Nader Morcos

Michael Gachet

Marc Hebert

Peter Barszczewski

Sophie Pronovost

Nicolas Michaud

Video editing methods and systems enable an editor to edit a video project for which source media assets are located at a media storage server located remotely from the editor with substantially the same fidelity and editing feature set that would be available if the source media assets and editor were co-located. A video editing client used by the editor maintains a persistent cache of proxy media with the layers of the video project stored independently, facilitating editing with combinations locally originated assets and remote assets. The client requests frames not already cached from the remote server via a low bandwidth network. Unless a frame is purged from the cache, no frame is requested from the server more than once. A multi-level priority prefetching scheme, including sequence-based prefetching, populates the cache with frames likely to be requested during editing.

Full fidelity remote video editing

Performance of rendering of effects on media data may be improved by analyzing properties defined for an effect to identify static and dynamic time segments within the effect. A static time segment in an effect is a time segment for which only one image is rendered. A dynamic time segment in an effect is a time segment for which each sample of media data in the time segment is rendered. An effect can contain any number of static and dynamic time segments. By identifying these time segments in an effect, processing and caching of the rendered effect are more finely grained. In particular, rendered time segments in an effect may be cached, such that a change in the effect in one time segment does not require re-rendering of other time segments. Thus, unnecessary rendering may be avoided, and invalidation of cached rendered media data and subsequent rerendering also may be reduced. In an animated effect, only one sample of media data may be rendered for a time segment in an effect if property animation and input material are both static in the time segment. If a key frame is inserted into a function curve of a property for an effect in such a way that the curve does not change, then any cached media data previously rendered for the effect need not be invalidated for the effect or for a time segment in the effect that contains this key frame. For a time segment in an effect in which properties do not change input media data in any fashion, no rendering is needed. Such a time segment may be either a static or dynamic time segment, depending on the input to the effect.

Analysis of properties of effects for rendering and caching of media data

A method and system for editing function curves in a computer-based editing or animation environment. The method consists of defining a region having two dimensions. The region contains a number of selected keys associated with one or more function curves. Resizing or moving the region causes the selected keys to be resized or moved accordingly.

Method and system for editing function curves in two dimensions

The present invention advantageously provides for a method and system that is operable on a computer system, for selectively determining parameters values or keys to be made available to graphical imaging system to drive a animation application. The method includes receiving a Parameter Set (PSet) having a plurality of parameters corresponding to the animation application, assigning one or more of said parameters a value; marking a subset of said parameters, modifying the keys of only marked parameters according to the parameter's value, and running the animation application in response to the keys after marking.

Marking parameters for animation

A system has a hierarchical organization for modifying and applying tools for manipulating data types. The system has a user interface for displaying the hierarchical organization, an inspector for viewing and modifying an internal structure of the tools and a button for launching each of the inspectors.

Taxonomy of objects and a system of non-modal property inspectors

The present invention concerns a multimedia presentation computer program that includes method and apparatus for sharing presentation functions between portions of the program by means of an interface that is implemented as one or more dynamically linked custom programs that perform one or more functions as the multimedia presentation computer program executes. A number of interface methods in the multimedia presentation computer program are declared and are implemented in the custom program The interface methods of the custom program are made accessible to the multimedia presentation computer program by means of an identifier. A host program within the multimedia presentation computer program communicates with the custom program by means of custom program parameters that at least in part define operation of the custom program. The custom program executes and thereby implements its one or more functions for use by the multimedia presentation computer program.

Multimedia plug-in using dynamic objects

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Boucherville, Canada

Daniel Desbois