Cliplets: What They Are and How You Can Make Them

We just became aware of an interesting new way to juxtapose still photographs and video in one interesting and compelling image. Microsoft calls these juxtapositions, Cliplets. If you have a lot of videos and some experience with image editors, you might want to experiment with making your own Cliplets. Cliplets are attention-getting and sometimes visually stunning.

Microsoft offers a free program that makes it relatively easy to create Cliplets from any video. You can download the free Cliplets software from here. . It works with 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows 7 (Home Premium and up). If you’re interested in creating dazzling Cliplets to display on the Web, your NotOverTheHill page, your Facebook Page or personal home page, watching a few of the short tutorials on this page is a must. These tutorials are brief and very well done.

If you want to see how creative and interesting Cliplets can be, spend a few minutes browsing through the Cliplet gallery here.

While there is no official Microsoft support for the Cliplet program, they do provide users access to the Cliplet support forum. If you need help creating Cliplets you’ll want to visit the Cliplet support forum here http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/cliplets

Now a nice summation from the folks at Microsoft Research is in order:

“Cliplets is a research project from Microsoft Research. This project explores a form of visual media that juxtaposes still image and video segments, both spatially and temporally, to expressively abstract a moment. The tension between static and dynamic elements in a cliplet reinforces both aspects, strongly focusing the viewer’s attention or conveying a narrative. We develop a set of idioms, essentially spatiotemporal mappings, that characterize these cliplet elements, and use these idioms in an interactive system to quickly compose a cliplet from ordinary handheld video. A key challenge is to avoid seam artifacts by maintaining spatiotemporal continuity in the cliplet composition. We address this using several algorithms from computer graphics and vision. “