Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubeGoPro videos are cool in theory but sometimes nauseating in practice. That need not be the case, Microsoft says. The company has a new algorithm that can turn lurching, perhaps boring first-person videos into a smooth, sped-up, polished product. The Hyperlapse version plays at ten times the speed of the original and eliminates many of the effects of camera shake.Ordinarily, speeding up a shaky video only amplifies the shakes. But running the video through Microsoft’s algorithm before speeding it up creates a new camera path, one without the wobbles inherent in shots taken by helmet-mounted cameras.The program also rebuilds the entire scene, which lets it replace some frames with computer-generated ones. For example, it might inject frames with a slightly different viewpoint from the original to create a smoother sequence. The result is a video that looks like it was filmed from a perfectly still professional apparatus.Microsoft Research announced Hyperlapse at computer-graphics conference Siggraph and says it hopes to make the technology available as a Windows app.Rachel Z. ArndtRachel Z. Arndt is the author of the essay collection Beyond Measure. Her writing has appeared in Quartz, The Believer, Fast Company, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.
