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The secret behind the time-lapse function in the iOS 8 Camera app

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[vimeo 106877886 w=800 h=450]

People these days have short attention-spans, so although time-lapse videos can be very appealing, most of us would probably prefer to watch one for 30 seconds rather than ten minutes. Thanks to a clever feature which Apple simply refers to as “dynamically selected intervals,” almost any time-lapse video you shoot in the default Camera app in iOS 8 will end up as 20-40 seconds, whether you shoot for 10 minutes or two hours …


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Instagram’s Hyperlapse video shooter adds support for front camera & iPhone 6/6 Plus

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Last month Instagram launched a new video shooting app for iPhone and iPad that combines effects like time-lapse and cinema stabilization called Hyperlapse. Today Instagram is introducing what they call the “selfielapse” by adding support for shooting Hyperlapse videos with the front facing camera on your device using the same features previously only available on the back camera…


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iOS 8 How-to: Take a time-lapse video

New in iOS 8 you have the ability to record time-lapse photography right from the Camera app. Time-lapse photography is a type of photography that happens when the frame rate is lower than what is used to view the sequence. When the photo is played at normal speed, time looks to be faster. However, not everything would make a great time-lapse subject. Good time-lapse subjects include cloudscapes, celestial motion, plants growing, cars driving on a busy intersection and of crowds. In this how-to I will discuss how to make a time-lapse photographs.


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Instagram details the technology behind its new Hyperlapse app

As you can see above, Instagram’s new Hyperlapse app that debuted yesterday is one of the most simple apps on the surface. It does two things: shoots video in either portrait or landscape and changes speed from 1x to 12x for a time-lapse effect. There’s not very much other user interface aside from the record button and speed slider (and the share screen after you save a video), but under the hood there’s a lot of really smart stuff going on with Hyperlapse.

For those interested in all the under-the-hood work that went in to Hyperlapse’s video stabilization and time-lapse features, Instagram’s engineers behind the app have published a blog post detailing the technology that makes it all work.

The blog post goes into Hyperlapse’s approach to video stabilization, time-lapse stabilization, and adaptive zoom to detail how it all works under the surface. Below is a snippet including a chart describing one of the algorithms used by the app.

Video stabilization is instrumental in capturing beautiful fluid videos. In the movie industry, this is achieved by having the camera operator wear a harness that separates the motion of the camera from the motion of the operator’s body. Since we can’t expect Instagrammers to wear a body harness to capture the world’s moments, we instead developed Cinema, which uses the phone’s built-in gyroscope to measure and remove unwanted hand shake.

The diagram below shows the pipeline of the Cinema stabilization algorithm. We feed gyroscope samples and frames into the stabilizer and obtain a new set of camera orientations as output. These camera orientations correspond to a smooth “synthetic” camera motion with all the unwanted kinks and bumps removed.

If you’re interested in the wonkier side of capturing video and software, give Instagram’s post a read and check out Hyperlapse for iPhone and iPad on the App Store.

Check out iOS 8’s Time-lapse camera mode in action (Video)

As shown in our recent top hidden features article, iOS 8 has a new built-in time-lapse camera mode. This feature will allow you to explore the world of time-lapse photography and capture stunning visuals. This is definitely a nifty little feature, but thanks to a new video posted by YouTuber iTwe4kz, we now have a good look at what this mode is capable of on an iPhone 5s.


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