Confessions of a researchaholic

Here is my current workflow to produce a video or prepare a talk for a research project.

Write down the story/script in plain text and rough drawings. Do not use any specific media at this early stage as it can prematurely limit our creativity.

Commit the script into a storyboard via slides (e.g. PowerPoint).
I then gradually flesh out the storyboard into a video and talk using the same set of slide files. This might sound unusual, so let me explain.

Start with video. When I was in grad school I learned time-line based tools (e.g. Adobe Premiere) to author and edit videos. But recently I found it more natural to use slides instead of time-lines for research videos. The main reason is that a research video usually contains short video segments glued together by narration, which involves more storyboarding than time-line manipulation.

I first produce the individual video segments using specific tools (e.g. dumping individual frames from my renderer and convert them into a video via MovieMaker), and embed them into PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint provides a rich set of tools for annotation, animation, and transition, which I find handy (and harder to do via Adobe Premiere). I automate all object animations and slide transitions, and dump the entire project into a video file.
I submit the video along with the paper, and go screw around.

PowerPoint allows flexible manual control, but it can be tedious due to lack of automation/scripting tools. Thus, it is important to properly decompose the above process into (1) automatic creation of (video) components and (2) manual insertion/combination of these components into the slides. It is a trade-off among quality, control, and manual labor.

When the time comes to prepare the talk, I can simply start with my slide file, which already contains the script, the video segments, and associated effects. I just need to turn off those automatic animations and transitions that I wish to manual control, and add additional information for a talk, usually verbal stuff such as previous works, algorithm details, and future directions.

I find this much more efficient than starting new slides from scratch.
I also find that for those projects that I were too lazy/busy to make videos, the talk slides I ended up doing are often not too far from being videos.
It is almost always a good idea to have a video to present the gist of our project in a few minutes, more appealing and efficient than absorbing the same amount of information from reading the paper.

Presenting algorithms is a good exercise to think and talk in an intuitive and straightforward manner. Hard to do when facing a deadline, but I like to prepare the presentation while writing the paper.

As an example, here is an early version of the video-slide file for my siga14 paper autocomplete painting repetitions.

There is a course in the upcoming SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 conference on how to make a SIGGRAPH paper.

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