Apps and Software By Russell Holly Aug. 26, 2014 4:31 pm
The folks at Instagram announced a new feature in the form of an entirely new app today, called Hyperlapse. The idea is fairly simple, taking long chunks of video and turning them into short bursts of stabilized imagery*for everyone to enjoy. We took a quick drive around the block to see how this app worked, and the end results are definitely one of the cooler things you can now do with your phone or tablet.
Hyperlapse is an incredibly simple app. When you fire it up, you get a single button to start recording and nothing else. The image you will see on the screen looks like a zoomed-in version of what you would normally see through the camera, but this is intentional. There are no zoom controls, but you can tap and focus on a single point on the viewfinder. Once you start recording, there will be a counter on the bottom of the screen to tell you how much you have recorded in real time, which is adjacent to the length of you Hyperlapse video. By default, the video is sped up six times — for every six minutes you record, there will be one minute of Hyperlapse video.
When you have finished recording, you will be invited to adjust the speed of your Hyperlapse video. Things can be sped up to twelve times, or slowed down to two. It’s a simple slider with a check box at the top of the screen for you to tap when the video speed is where you want it. Once you have accepted the video, Hyperlapse will blur the screen and process the video to your liking. This takes a bit depending on how much video you have captured, but isn’t a big deal otherwise. Once you have a finished Hyperlapse video, you can choose to share it to Instagram or Facebook, or you can go back and record another Hyperlapse video. It’s simple, straightforward, and very cool.
Sharing a Hyperlapse video to Instagram means the video needs to be edited to 15 seconds, which can be kind of a bummer if you have more to show. Instagram will allow you to apply filters to the recording, which can also be kind of nice. The raw Hyperlapse video is available in your camera roll, but what you get in this situation is just the recorded video sped up without the Hyperlapse zoom and crop. This means you run the risk of a terrible-looking vertical video in Hyperlapse, just like we did.
This is an undeniably cool feature for Instagram to have rolled out, and it’s the kind of thing that will encourage some creative people to do very clever things. Hyperlapse is only currently available for iOS due to some APIs that Instagram feels are missing from Android. As soon as that gets cleared up, though, this will be a fantastic tool for everyone to enjoy.
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Hyperlapse is an incredibly simple app. When you fire it up, you get a single button to start recording and nothing else. The image you will see on the screen looks like a zoomed-in version of what you would normally see through the camera, but this is intentional. There are no zoom controls, but you can tap and focus on a single point on the viewfinder. Once you start recording, there will be a counter on the bottom of the screen to tell you how much you have recorded in real time, which is adjacent to the length of you Hyperlapse video. By default, the video is sped up six times — for every six minutes you record, there will be one minute of Hyperlapse video.
When you have finished recording, you will be invited to adjust the speed of your Hyperlapse video. Things can be sped up to twelve times, or slowed down to two. It’s a simple slider with a check box at the top of the screen for you to tap when the video speed is where you want it. Once you have accepted the video, Hyperlapse will blur the screen and process the video to your liking. This takes a bit depending on how much video you have captured, but isn’t a big deal otherwise. Once you have a finished Hyperlapse video, you can choose to share it to Instagram or Facebook, or you can go back and record another Hyperlapse video. It’s simple, straightforward, and very cool.
Sharing a Hyperlapse video to Instagram means the video needs to be edited to 15 seconds, which can be kind of a bummer if you have more to show. Instagram will allow you to apply filters to the recording, which can also be kind of nice. The raw Hyperlapse video is available in your camera roll, but what you get in this situation is just the recorded video sped up without the Hyperlapse zoom and crop. This means you run the risk of a terrible-looking vertical video in Hyperlapse, just like we did.
This is an undeniably cool feature for Instagram to have rolled out, and it’s the kind of thing that will encourage some creative people to do very clever things. Hyperlapse is only currently available for iOS due to some APIs that Instagram feels are missing from Android. As soon as that gets cleared up, though, this will be a fantastic tool for everyone to enjoy.
More...
