SBIR Phase I: MediaCloud: Distributed Computing System for Online Rich Media Creation

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop an online system for the creation and distribution of rich media content - video and computer animation. The system will provide a service to both non-professional consumers interested in the creation and distribution of new content based upon their personal media; and professionals in the media-production industry. The architecture is necessitated by the confluence of: 1) the wide scale adoption of social networking and online media sharing websites; 2) the nascent video editing and rendering capabilities currently offered online, largely restricted to linear editing capabilities, and lacking support for multi-stream and collaborative editing. The approach will automatically configure, schedule, and manage multiple virtualized storage and compute resources (a compute and storage Cloud) needed for complex complete media processing workflows, leveraging advanced commodity hardware acceleration, virtualized compute resources, and a cognitive model of film editing to support prosumers in executing advanced editing and post-production operations. If successful, this project will have a number of broad impacts. It will result in a wide area architecture that will be able to support the processing of media across widely-available web data centers. Ultimately, this will give consumers ubiquitous access to advanced video and graphics capabilities at lower cost. By tying together local, enterprise, and remotely managed virtualized compute and storage resources, it will allow both prosumers and professionals to execute a range of image and graphics workflows with performance gains not currently available in similar online services. Specifically, the Cognitive Editing capability will allow prosumers to execute complex advanced editing functions (e.g. cuts guided by focus of attention) and allow professionals to index and retrieve scenes using tags with semantic relevance.