Brands have already jumped on Instagram’s Hyperlapse bandwagon
Instagram has empowered average users to enhance their photos with different kinds of filters without the need to be Photoshop geeks. You open the app, it’s auto-ready to take a picture, and then you apply filter of your choice with one touch and it’s done – ready to be shared with the wide world.
Instagram has become an integral part of our pop culture. In fact, for some it is unthinkable to eat the food in front them unless they immortalize it via an Instagram shot. When Facebook acquired it, users were afraid Instagram would lose it mojo… instead Mark Zukerberg promised to run it separately and kept his word, so far.
From the time of acquisition, Instagram hasn’t stop innovating. They launched a 15sec video last year, and a stand-alone picture messaging app called Bolt a few months ago. Last week, Instagram launched yet another nifty app called Hyperlapse to enable users seamlessly record and share timelaspe videos on the iPhone. (Download it for free for iPhone. Due to API issues it is not available currently on Android.)
“We designed Hyperlapse to be as simple as possible. You don’t need an account to create a Hyperlapse. Instead, you open up straight to the camera. Tap once to begin recording and tap again to stop. Choose a playback speed that you like between 1x-12x and tap the green check mark to save it to your camera roll. You can share your video on Instagram easily from there,” said the company in a statement.
Video engineering marvel
Traditionally, the setups to record time lapse video is logistic intensive, it requires the camera be set up on a track and programmed to move at a steady speed. So much of engineering muscle has gone into creating and refining the underlying Cinema Stabilization algorithm that uses the phone's built-in gyroscope to measure camera movement for the real-time processing capability to create time lapse clips. You can check Instagram Engineering team blog here.
“Imagine a video clip, taken from a moving car. To even the juddering camera motion, image stabilization algorithms typically analyze a movie frame by frame, identifying image fragments common to each. By recording how those shared points jump around across frames, algorithms can then infer how the camera has been moving. By reverse engineering that motion data, software can recreate a new, steadier version of a film clip. Yet every step in that process requires processing muscle. That’s fine for a movie studio, which has massive computers that crank overnight to re-render a scene. It’s ridiculous for a smartphone.”
Mike Krieger Co-founder of Instagram commented, “Cinematic stabilization plus add-ons like Hyperlapse are to video in many ways what filters were to photos when we first launched; make things look good beyond what you'd expect given the camera sensor and have a great effort-to-output ratio.”
Regarding the genesis of Hyperlapse, Mike explained, “Hyperlapse came out of a Pitch-a-thon we ran earlier this year. The goal was to get some interesting ideas for creative tools both inside and outside IG. One project that came out of that was our editing tools which we shipped a few months ago (highlights/shadows/etc); another one is Hyperlapse, which the two engineers worked on during an FB-wide hackathon and got a bunch of help from design & PM (and sound design!) to get shipped. We spent most of the last few months cutting features to get it into the simplest experience we could find and had nothing else we could take away.”
This will unleash all sort of creativity that wasn’t available before, we can’t wait to see what creative people will do with this.
Here is Teacher’s Day campaign by Krispy Kreme India.
What are the most creative Hyperlapse videos you’ve come across? Please share the links in the comments below.
