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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.
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
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.
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
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 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. Anachronistic a newspaper might be, but depending on the paper it can certainly deliver a more accurate, balanced and realistic view of the world.