The growing size of organizations is making it increasingly expensive to attend meetings and difficult to retain what happened in those meetings. Meeting video capture systems exist to support video conferencing for remote participation or archiving for later review, but they have been regarded ineffective. The reason is twofold. Firstly, the conventional way of capturing video using a single static camera fails to capture focus and context. Secondly, a single static view is often monotonous, making the video onerous to review. To address these issues, often human camera operators are employed to capture effective videos with changing views, but this approach is expensive. In this thesis, we argue that camera views can be changed automatically to produce meeting videos effectively and inexpensively. We automate the camera view control by automatically determining the visual focus of attention as a function of time and moving the camera to capture it. In order to determine visual focus of attention for different meetings, we conducted experiments and interviewed television production professionals who capture meeting videos. Furthermore, television production principles were used to appropriately frame shots and switch between shots. The result of the evaluation of the automatic camera control system indicated its significant benefits over conventional static camera view. By applying television production principles various issues related to shot stability and screen motion were resolved. The performance of the automatic camera control based on television production principles also approached the performance of trained human camera crew. To further reduce the cost of the automation, we also explored the application of computer vision and audio tracking. Results of our explorations provide empirical evidence in support of the utility of camera control encouraging future research in this area. Successful application of television production principles to automatically control cameras suggest various ways to handle issues involved in the automation process.

Knowledge transferred during meetings is often ephemeral in nature and thus must be captured if it is to be retained. Ideally, a capture solution should be able to 1) accommodate any number of screens without sacrificing image quality and 2) allow dynamic access to a complete media capture while the capture is taking place. Both students and employees can benefit from the information captured during the lectures and meetings for enhanced discussion and afterward for knowledge retention. Current systems do not support multiple screen capture well, and no system supports dynamic access to the active meeting capture during the meeting. We built a central display server that manages communication to all participants and presenter, manages what is shown on each display, captures all media sent to it and allows playback of that capture on the fly. Static media (images, video, and audio) can be referenced, along with dynamic media (desktop sharing), by any participant's notes in order to initiate and direct playback of the meeting capture – in other words, rewind the presentation. We validated the functionality of our tool by simulating a three screen class lecture where each student performed tasks requiring them to access the capture both during and after the meeting. With basic training, all participants successfully engaged in the rewind interaction and review process.