Keyframe

Keyframes are fundamental to animation and video editing. Instead of specifying every single frame's properties, animators and editors define only the key moments. The software then automatically generates the intermediate frames (in-betweening) to create the illusion of motion or change. This significantly reduces the workload and allows for easier adjustments and refinements. In computer vision, keyframes can also refer to representative frames extracted from a video sequence, chosen because they capture the most salient information or represent significant scene changes. These are useful for tasks such as video summarization, indexing, and retrieval. Algorithms for keyframe extraction often consider factors such as shot boundaries, motion analysis, and content similarity to identify the most informative frames. The selection process balances redundancy reduction with the preservation of important visual information.