Shot-by-Shot Movie Version Comparison

Some movies are released in two or more versions. One of the frequent causes is shrinking the movie for theatrical showcase with subsequent release of both the theatrical (shrunk) cut and the director’s (original, extended) cut. Automatic editing difference detection is complicated by potential changes to color gamut, aspect ratio, reduced or increased length of individual scenes, object addition or removal. These difficulties make it impossible to directly apply existing approaches to editing map construction. We propose an algorithm for fully automatic construction of an editing map of two movie versions.