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Google Photos Can Now Stabilize All Your Shaky Phone Camera Videos (theverge.com)
In early August, Google announced a feature for the Google Photos mobile app that would automatically stabilize videos in your camera roll. That feature is now rolling out via Photos v2.13 on Android. The Verge reports: A lot of flagship smartphones offer optical image stabilization when shooting video, a hardware feature that helps keep footage smooth. Others, like Google's Pixel, use software to try and stabilize jerky movements. Putting stabilization inside the Google Photos app could enhance results further if you're already working with hardware OIS, or improve recordings significantly if your phone lacks any means of steadying things out of the box. The stabilized video is cropped in a bit, as you might expect, and the original clip remains in your Photos library; there's no overwriting. Here's a side-by-side demo someone else made of the app's latest trick.
God, I am so tired of TV news programs that show jiggly, bouncy, shaky video clips from some "witness's" cell phone. These clips rarely contain any useful or even relevant information and whatever might have been learned from them is totally obscured by all the camera motion. And the TV producers think it is news! More often than not, I have been quite happy to wait until next morning to read all about the event, whatever it was, in the newspaper.
A nice belt of the good stuff will stabilize those videos.
So if I run every movie that is ruined by Shaky-Cam it'll fix it? Great!
It might make Michael Bay movies watchable.
What's next, Google Videos can now color-correct all your photos?
Let me know when it can convert the video to landscape mode and then punch the person who recorded it.
I'll be impressed when it stabilizes the middle east, and my meth lab
The skiing side by side looks good but the reporter's test has all the horrible warping effects that their incompetent youtube implementation has. Warping quality matters and Google for all their smarts seem to have some utterly incompetent people working on this feature. The skiing video suggests that the problem might not be pure technical incompetence but some marketing drones getting in the way of doing the right thing. Either way, until they apply a linear (in hyperbolic space) homography and not a terrible non linear morphing jell-o warp this feature will remain useless.
ffmpeg has had the vid.stab filter for several years. The only news here seems to be another cloud service.
I've used the stabilization feature a few times in the past 3-4 years. It works very well in my opinion.
Surprised it took them so long to apply it to other services.
BlameBillCosby.com
One possible bug: If a moving object approaches the camera at the same bearing, parts of it would be marked as "inifinity" and create weird effects.
Parallax based depth determination is one of the reasons for birds striking aircraft. Aircraft might escape with minor damage or a major disaster, but the bird almost always dies! It is in its interest to avoid hitting the plane. But birds have eyes on the side, not overlapping stereoscopic field of vision. The determine depth by parallax, they are constantly moving, and unchanging parts of the image on the retina are at infinity and changing parts are closer. That is why birds sitting on branches constantly cock their heads back and forth to get depth perception. When a bird approaches a plane such that the plane is at constant bearing, it things the plane is far way at inifinity.
Would very much like to test this "app" by approaching the camera at a constant bearing to see what it does.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The demo is interesting, but the results look bad to me. Cropped for sure, but also looks blurry and lots of parallax. I'd rather watch the original, but it is interesting.
Great. Now do something about fixing the orientation of all those bleeping vertical videos.
VIDEO SHOULD NOT BE FILMED VERTICALLY!
Finally, I'll be able to see clear professional photos of Aliens Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster once Google takes away the shakes and blurs.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
God, I am so tired of TV news programs that show jiggly, bouncy, shaky video clips from some "witness's" cell phone.
You watch the news on TV? How quaint! I haven't seen a TV news broadcast in years since they're typically well behind the actual news cycle.
And the TV producers think it is news! More often than not, I have been quite happy to wait until next morning to read all about the event, whatever it was, in the newspaper.
Oh and you read a paper too! The next day even. You're quite the anachronism. The rest of us just found out about it on the internet a few minutes after it happened.
It's not bad. I'm sure there are scenarios that will trip it up, and over time those will get improved. That said, if I'm recording on a mobile device I would much rather use Hyperlapse, which uses the device's motion sensors and does a much better job than anything else I've used, including seriously powerful desktop software.
Say someone is recording video of a subject that will not fully fit into the frame if the device is held horizontally. The camera's zoom feature is already at its widest. The person holding the camera cannot step back. Does it benefit the public more for an event to be recorded as vertical video or for it not to be recorded at all?
I suspect this is the same system they use on Youtube which is horrifically bad! The result is some warpy, nausea-inducing disaster.
i'm more bothered by shiteous vertical videos. yes, that's how you hold a phone but MOST SCREENS ARE HORIZONTAL
See also the vidstab filter for ffmpeg - open source goodness that does about as well: https://github.com/georgmartiu...
Seriously. No, seriously. If it doesn't fit in landscape mode, it's a space launch.
The push for even wider screens is absolutely stupid for computers, but all video should be in landscape mode. Look in the fucking mirror and notice that your eyes are arranged horizontally, not vertically.
transcode -J stabilize -i ./YOURVIDEO.MOV -y null,null -o dummy; transcode -J transform -i ./YOURVIDEO.MOV -y raw -o ./YOURVIDEOSTABILIZED.mov
Tada!
What you get a few minutes after the event is less that 5% of the story and is based mostly on rumours and speculation.
What I get is all the available information at the time. As that information becomes available I get it basically immediately. You're assertion that just 5% of the information is available immediately is made up numbers not based on any actual evidence.
What I get the next day in my newspaper is almost 90% of the story and the journalists (if they are any good, depends on the newspaper) have already eliminated most of the speculation and rumours.
Even if we stipulate that "speculation and rumor" have been magically eliminated within 24 hours (rarely true in practice) it still is well behind the news cycle and an unnecessary delay. While you are waiting 12-24 hours for your paper, the rest of us have been reading the information as it comes out, much of it from those very same journalists. Newspapers in paper form aren't magically more accurate than the same words written online. Furthermore you are limiting yourself to a substantially smaller number of sources by getting your news from a paper (people rarely read more than 1-3) versus the entire spectrum of sources available through the net, both good and bad.
Anachronistic a newspaper might be, but depending on the paper it can certainly deliver a more accurate, balanced and realistic view of the world.
Newspapers do not possess information or analytical resources which are not available through internet sources. In fact most newspapers are working frantically to get online because their business model is dangerously close to obsolete so their thoughts are available online too. I can read your newspaper source plus literally hundreds of other sources at the same time without having to wait 24 hours for some journalist to spoon feed me their (probably biased) interpretation. I don't trust any single source no matter how reliable and if you depend on an actual physical newspaper for your news then you are doing yourself a disservice.