An artist who mixes audio often adds musical accompaniment to video. The employment of these artists is expensive and is not feasible for a video presentation at home. Our automatic audio and video mixing technique is suitable for home videos. It uses a pivoting vector space mapping method that combines video footage with musical segments based on aesthetic cinematic heuristics.
Audio mixing is an important aspect of filmmaking. Most videos such as feature films and sitcoms have several segments devoid of any speech. The addition of carefully chosen music to such segments conveys emotions such as joy, tension or melancholy. It also acts as a mechanism to save the scenes and can increase the feeling of excitement in a car chase or reflect the somber mood of a tragic situation. In a typical professional video production, expert audio editors aesthetically add the appropriate sound to the video footage. This process is tedious, time consuming and costly. With the rapid proliferation in the use of digital camcorders, amateur video enthusiasts are producing a lot of videos at home. Many home video users want to make their videos appear as professional productions before sharing them with family and friends. To meet this demand, companies like Muvee Technologies produce software tools to give home videos a professional look. Our work is motivated by similar goals. Muvee's available software tool allows the user to choose a video segment, an audio clip and a mix style (for example, a music video or a slow romantic). Muvee software automatically adjusts the chosen video to the given audio clip by incorporating special effects like gradient transitions, whose type depends on the style chosen. If a user chooses an appropriate audio and style for the video, the result is really impressive. However, a typical home video user would lack the high skill level of a professional audio mixer needed to choose the right audio clip for a particular video. It is very possible to choose an inappropriate audio clip (say the one with a fast tempo) for a video clip (one that is slow with almost no movement).