Last Tuesday Instagram released Hyperlapse, the app to record hand-held time-lapses. The good thing is that it stabilises the shots very well, so that when you play it at 12x speed any camera movements look smooth. The bad thing is that to do so, of course, the area of the image used is reduced. Since smartphones don’t have optical stabilisation systems, the app has to use software to get rid of the jitter.
That means that the already narrow angle of the iPhone camera is even more tight when you use Hyperlapse, because it needs spare space in the edges of the original frame in order to move the final frame. Definition is also sacrificed. The good thing is that when you record, the screen already shows you the cut, final frame. Actually, if Hyperlapse uses an algorithm similar to the one Microsoft explains in this video, it is much much more complex than that.
Since I don’t use Instagram, I filmed some hyperlapses and pretended to publish them in Vine. Hyperlapse doesn’t encourage you to film in landscape, and since Vine has a square aspect ratio, I decided to film in portrait. It seems that holding your iPhone vertically you can keep it more stable. Big mistake! When I wanted to import those hyperlapses in Vine, they didn’t play.
Vine can’t work with vertical videos generated by Hyperlapse. So I downloaded Lumify, a very nice video editor for iOS. I had to compile my Vine video in Lumify, taking care of zooming each vertical video, so that when imported to Vine and therefore cut into 1:1 aspect ratio, no letterbox would be seen. Then imported it and published it. On the other hand, landscape videos are rendered fine in Vine.
The result? A speeded up video inside a frame in a frame in a frame. My eyes are now bleeding.