Apple Inc.

Wendy L DeVore

Aaron M Eppolito

Conner Stuart Richardson

Giovanni M Agnoli

Gregory L Dudey

Anne E Fink

Some embodiments provide a media compositing method that performs automated processes (1) to analyze the media content pieces (MCPs) to define one or more MCP groups, and (2) produces a user interface (UI) layout that identifies the defined MCP groups as groups for which the method can display composite presentations (e.g., video presentations). To define the MCP groups, the method of some embodiments uses one or more media grouping templates (MGTs). In some embodiments, the method can define multiple MGT instances for an MGT. For instance, in some embodiments, the MGTs include (1) location-bounded MGTs (e.g., videos and/or photos captured within a region with a particular radius), (2) time-bounded MGTs (e.g., videos and/or photos captured within a particular time range and/or date range), (3) time-bounded and location-bounded MGTs (e.g., mornings at a beach), (4) content-defined MGTs (e.g., videos and/or photos containing smiles), and (5) user-metadata based MGTs (e.g., MCPs from albums created by the user, MCPs shared by a user with others, MCPs having particular user-defined metadata tags, etc.).

Grouping media content for automatically generating a media presentation

A method to author music. The method includes generating, based on a collection of media clips stored on a device, an audio component for an audio/video (A/V) presentation, determining a plurality of locations within the audio component where a beat, onset, segment boundary, or stinger occurs within the audio component, selecting a particular location in the plurality of locations as a transition location, generating, based the collection of media clips and the transition location within the audio component, a video component for the A/V presentation, and generating the A/V presentation based on the audio component and the video component.

Synchronizing audio and video components of an automatically generated audio/video presentation

Some embodiments provide an application that can automatically generate a movie from a collection of media clips stored on a device or accessible by the device. The movie creation process of some embodiments uses novel video and audio compositors that dynamically composite video and audio components of the movie. The video compositors process explores different combination of media clips and media-clip arrangements to produce an interesting video presentation. The audio compositor receives the duration of the video presentation, and dynamically generates a song for the video presentation based on this duration. Another novel interaction is that in some embodiments the audio compositor provides the starting location of its last segment to the video compositor so that the video compositor can align the start of the last video segment with this ending segment. In some embodiments, the video and audio compositors also synchronize fade-out effects that they apply to their respective presentations with each other. Also, in some embodiments, the video compositor can ask the audio compositor for one or more audio onsets that are near a particular time in the presentation. In some of these embodiments, the audio compositor returns (1) a list of onsets that are near a time that is specified by the video compositor, and (2) a priority for each of these onsets. The video compositor then uses this list of onsets to align an edit point in the composite video's definition to the location of one of the onsets based the specified priority value(s) and the desirability of the video edit at the onset location.

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Truckee, CA, United States of America

Wendy L DeVore