Archiving, processing, and intelligent retrieval of digital video sequences can be efficiently solved by a high-level representation of video sequences. We describe a complete system for encoding the contents of video sequences based on their syntactical and semantical description. Our techniques are built on two phases: analysis and synthesis. The analysis phase involves the automatic generation of a syntactical structure using image and image-sequence analysis, image understanding as well as text recognition. Moreover, the syntactical description of images will be completed by a semantical understanding of video sequences. The full representation of video sequences will be generated during the synthesis phase by combining results from the analysis phase. Our developed prototype system is planned to be integrated into the co-operative work of a TV-team of the TV-station “Radio Bremen”.Additionally, we describe some special functionality: scene analysis by clustering of video sequences with the aim of identifying a typical video genre. The latter is an useful approach for automatic trailer generation and for intelligent video editing as add-on for a video-cut-system.