Today, at its Menlo Park headquarters, Facebook’s Instagram division announced ‘Cinema,’ a new feature that will cut wobbling from clips that its users shoot. Kevin Systrom, a founder at Instagram, stated that the company had worked with a team of ‘video scientists’ to build the product.
Essentially, when you take a clip while moving, you don’t do a great job holding your phone steady. Cinema will assist you by eliminating your bounce and pan to create a clip that is far more watchable.
Is Cinema digital magic, or a simple crop job? TNW’s Matthew Panzarino opined that it appears likely to be something quite pedestrian: “The Instagram video stabilization looks like a simple digital crop and stabilize technique. Note that the before and after is cropped in.”
On Twitter, Joe Rosensteel replied that that would be the only way to pull off the effect sans heavy lifting. Panzarino agreed, but stated that Instagram “just oversold it a bit.”
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Introducing Video on Instagram from Instagram on Vimeo.
The timing of this release dovetails with the announcement that Instagram now supports video of up to 15 seconds. That news was hardly a surprise, as rumors have swirled for some time now about the now-available feature.
While Cinema will help Facebook users create better videos, the capability isn’t utterly new; YouTube’s Capture application has a similar capability.
Top Image Credit: Kevin Krejci
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