Apple have recently applied for some interesting “Smart” video editing patents

The first patent named “Smart Transistions is about applications automatically selecting a transition between clips based on content, metadata or ‘sideband data’.

“… if it is determined that the content of adjoining video clips is temporally proximate (i.e., was captured on the same day), a hard-cut transition may be selected for transitioning between the adjoining video clips. If it is determined that the content of the video clips is temporally distant (i.e., was captured on different days), a crossfade transition may be selected for transitioning between the adjoining video clips. If it is determined that the content of the adjoining video clips contains a high amount of motion, a hard-cut may be selected for transitioning between the adjoining video clips. If it is determined that the content of the adjoining video clips contains a low amount of motion, a crossfade transition may be selected. Moreover, if it determined that the color characteristics of two adjoining video clips are similar, a hard-cut transition may be selected; if the color characteristics are different, a crossfade transition may be selected.”

As well as selecting a transition between two clips, Apple suggests that sequences as a whole can be analysed to see if some transitions have been applied too often and also includes a process that would help the software automatically choose in and out points. Alex Gollner discusses this more

“the video editing application may automatically identify defective portions of the video clip. A defective portion of a video clip may be identified by performing image analysis to detect rotation in the video image, blur in the video image, over-exposure of the video image, or under-exposure of the video image”

The second patent Smart Scaling and Cropping is for a method of scaling up clips to focus on important objects and people in video clips:

“Smart scaling and cropping of video clips is disclosed. According to some implementations, a video clip sequence can be generated from one or more video clips. Video clips added to the video clip sequence can be automatically modified (e.g. scaled and/or cropped) to conform to the dimensions and/or aspect ratio of video clips in the video clip sequence. Video clips can be modified based on the spatial characteristics of the video clips, for example, the location and size of objects of interest (e.g., faces) in the video clips. Implementations may also include a method, system and/or non-transitory, computer-readable medium encoded with instructions for performing smart scaling and cropping. Other aspects and implementations are also disclosed.”

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