Presentation of the UIST 2020 paper "Automatic Video Creation From a Web Page" by researchers from the Google Research team. This paper introduces URL2Video, a research prototype pipeline to automatically convert a web page into a short video, given temporal and visual constraints provided by the content owner.
Authors: Peggy Chi, Zheng Sun, Katrina Panovich, and Irfan Essa
Abstract.
Creating marketing videos from scratch can be challenging, especially when designing for multiple platforms with different viewing criteria. We present URL2Video, an automatic approach that converts a web page into a short video given temporal and visual constraints. URL2Video captures quality materials and design styles extracted from a web page, including fonts, colors, and layouts. Using constraint programming, URL2Video's design engine organizes the visual assets into a sequence of shots and renders to a video with user-specified aspect ratio and duration. Creators can review the video composition, modify constraints, and generate video variation through a user interface. We learned the design process from designers and compared our automatically generated results with their creation through interviews and an online survey. The evaluation shows that URL2Video effectively extracted design elements from a web page and supported designers by bootstrapping the video creation process.
