III. Multimedia Editing

"You know you have achieved perfection in design,
Not when you have nothing more to add,
But when you have nothing more to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The electronic dissemination of multimedia contents involves previous editing of this material for presentation. With the emergence of powerful, yet reasonably priced hardware most of the video and audio editing is nowadays done digitally. Until now, most of the digital multimedia authoring tools, such as Adobe Premiere [Pre93], are based upon visual, easy-to-use direct-manipulation interfaces. This is not surprising, as most movie editors, producers, and graphic editors are visually thinking people. Nevertheless, there are many tasks that can be much better supported by a language-based multimedia authoring approach. Visual direct-manipulation user interfaces are limited by their manual nature, and can not easily accommodate algorithmically-defined operations. We suggest a melding of the common direct-manipulation interface with a programming language that has been enhanced to manipulate digital audio and video. The result is a system that can automate routine tasks as well as perform tasks based on sophisticated media recognition algorithms.