The present invention includes a system and a method for automatically authoring video compositions from longer units of digitized video (or a source video) by using short segments of video (or video "cliplets"). The video composition authoring process provides an aesthetically-pleasing layout of data elements to create a video composition. The data elements include multimedia elements, parameter information and description information. Any data elements that are missing but required are automatically selected by the system. The user may then review preliminary video composition results and refine the results if desired. The video composition authoring system includes an element selection and layout module for selecting the data elements in the video composition, and an iterative refinement module that allows the user to change and refine the preliminary results.