This demo video from Microsoft demonstrates a new technology, Microsoft Unwrap Mosaics, that can make it easy to do video special effects editing:

The representation has some of the power of a full reconstruction of 3D surface models from video, but is designed to be easy to recover from a priori unseen and uncalibrated footage. By modelling the image-formation process as a 2D-to-2D transformation from an object’s texture map to the image, modulated by an object-space occlusion mask, we can recover a representation which we term the “unwrap mosaic”.

Many editing operations can be performed on the unwrap mosaic, and then re-composited into the original sequence, for example resizing objects, repainting textures, copying/cutting/pasting objects, and attaching effects layers to deforming objects.

The software has the potential to bring new levels of special effects editing to consumer-level video software.

More information is available at the Microsoft Research site.