In the AutoBuddy Movie Kit the two players, the Driver and the Shooter, play a video game in which they drive around a post-apocalyptic LA-like city in a big American car shooting bad guys. The Driver and Shooter are in separate rooms and use headsets to communicate, and they each see the output of the video game on separate monitors.

AutoBuddy uses background subtraction to cut the Driver and Shooter out of their respective input videos and composite them into a virtual car in the output movie. There are 4 kinds of camera views in the output movie: a view that shows the Driver in the car as seen through the front windshield, a similar view of the Shooter, a view of both of them in the car, and the viewpoint of the Driver and Shooter out the front windshield.

The Movie Kit creates the movie by cutting between these four points of view based on the structure of the dialog between the Driver and the Shooter. For example, L-cuts are inserted to capture the Shooter's reaction to statements by the Driver.

View of Driver		View of Shooter
View of Driver and Shooter		View out front windshield

The AutoBuddy movie kit used two Sony video cameras to record the two players. The video was captured and digitized at 640x480 30fps using three Targa cards (one for each player and one for the output of the video game itself). We used the SCSI-Net storage system to record all three video streams simultaneously. The image processing was done using an early version of the MediaFlow image API ported to the Mac.

This movie has a soundtrack generated by the MediaCalc Soundtrack Generator application.