The primary purpose of the Microsoft’s Hyperlapse technology is to make more stable, usable, and shareable, video recordings from a smartphone. That absolutely represents their largest market, but if you’re reading this article, chances are you represent a smaller market that should have a close eye on this new tech: the video shooter or filmmaker.
Here’s the basics on what has come out.
Microsoft Hyperlapse creates smooth and stabilized timelapses from shaky first-person videos. So a long video recording from a bike ride, hike up a cliff, or other rough activities that are often captured with a GoPro, can be stabilized with this software.
There are mobile apps for Windows Phone and Android users, but as of yet no word on an iPhone app. Instagram’s Hyperlapse app has been around for a while, so how does it compare?
I’m glad you asked. In this wonderfully technical webpage, a direct comparison was made between the two. To sum it up, Microsoft’s tech:
…reconstructs a full 3D camera path and world model. This enables smoothing the camera path in space-time and generating an output video with a constant-speed camera, skipping over ‘slow’ parts of the input video, such as waiting times in front of red lights. Just as importantly, our method can fill the missing regions in the video above by stitching together pixels from multiple input frames.
Here’s a video that can explain it, if you’re not into that whole reading thing:
So why does this matter to filmmakers and adventure video shooters?
This tech already has a “Preview” desktop version, and once the whole enchilada is released, PC-based editors can make use of this advanced stabilization on their video projects. Historically, we’ve had to use After Effects’ Warp Stabilizer, which is great, but can only handle so much before the results look worse than the original footage. The ability to reconstruct areas of a frame and smooth out the motion could make this an extremely valuable tool in the kit of a video editor who deals with this kind of footage on a regular basis.
As of right now, only “Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro Preview” is out, and free, but it does leave a watermark on all footage. Once the “Pro” only version is available (no word on that) it is expected that for a small fee users can use the full version and not have to deal with the watermark. People who use the “Preview” version are encouraged to submit issues and questions to the forum for this software. A number of people are suggesting features to be included in the final version, including an option to smooth out video footage without speeding it up.