Patent ID: 7483619

Claim:
A method for creating a hierarchy of video sequences, the method comprising: creating source and destination video sequences and presenting the combination of one or more video clips and composites in a chronological order corresponding to their arrangement in a user interface layout area; creating a link between the source video sequence and the destination video sequence for transitioning between source and destination video sequences; and assigning one or more link attributes to the link, the one or more link attributes including: specifying a playback start point of the destination video sequence when entering the destination video sequence from any point in the source video sequence, wherein the playback start point is located at any point in the destination video sequence; specifying a playback resumption point when the destination playback is complete or is interrupted by a user, wherein the playback resumption point is located at one of any point in the source video sequence and any point in an alternate video sequence; reducing representations of a composite by selecting keyframes from video clips in the composite; displaying the keyframes to the user interface layout area in the same amount of space as the representation of a single video clip; and clipping of keyframes to reduce keyframes to a smaller size, wherein clipping comprises one or more of: selecting the center area of the keyframe as the portion to retain; and selecting objects in the foreground as the portion to retain using heuristics or a pixel sampling technique.