Architectures for multi-source multi-user video compositing
Louis C. Yun, David G. Messerschmidt · 1993
Video compositing is the editing and integrating of many video images into a single presentation.Several single-user compositing systems have already been suggested, but the multiple users problem remains unstudied.We propose two new architectures for digital video compositing in a multi-user environment that are both memory-efficient and can operate in real-time.We show that under hard throughput and bandwidth constraints, a memoryless solution for transferring data from many video sources to many users does not exist.We overcome this using (i) a dynamic memory buffering architecture; and (ii) a constant memory bandwidth solution that transforms the sources-to-users transfer schedule into 2 schedules, then pipelines the computation.The architectures support opaque overlapping of images, arbitrarily shaped images, and images whose shapes dynamically change from frame to frame.