Make Your First Time Lapse Video On Instagram's New 'Hyperlapse' App

Instagram launched an app called Hyperlapse on Tuesday that speeds up shaky videos and turns them into time-lapses.

mashable.com

Hyperlapse from Instagram features built-in stabilization technology that lets you create moving, handheld time lapses that result in a cinematic look, quality and feel—a feat that has previously only been possible with expensive equipment.

Using clever algorithm processing, the app makes it easy to use your phone to create tracking shots and fast, time-lapse videos that look as if they’re shot by Scorsese or Michael Mann.

wired.com

What is time lapse video? Time lapse is a cinematography technique in which a sequence of frames is taken at set intervals to record changes in a subject happening slowly over time. Once the frames of the video are played at a normal speed, it appears that time is moving faster — also known as lapsing. Some of the popular uses for this form of cinematography include athletic activities, road trips and cityscapes going from daylight to nighttime.

The app's most powerful feature, image stabilization, is not immediately obvious. Time-lapse videos have traditionally required the camera to remain in a fixed position, which is a lot easier said than done on mobile. But videos shot with Hyperlapse are smoothed out and stabilized so seamlessly you could easily be fooled into thinking you just happened to record with an extra steady hand.

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There is a difference between time lapse and hyper lapse. Time lapse images are taken at designated intervals over long periods and is sped up in the final video. Hyper lapse involves moving a camera across a distance as the images are being shot.

In fact, the app is almost deceptively simple. Record a video, select a playback speed, save and share. No additional editing, tweaking or user account required.

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The app launches with the camera, one tap starts the recording and a second stops it. As you record, you'll see two timers, the first is how long your video is and the second is how long your video will be once it's compressed into the default 6x playback rate (more on playback speed in a minute).

After downloading the Hyperlapse app, users can tap to record and tap again to stop. Then you can select the playback speed, making shots up to 12 times faster. Videos are then saved to the camera roll and can be shared to Instagram or Facebook from there.

mashable.com

We designed Hyperlapse to be as simple as possible. You don’t need an account to create a hyperlapse. Instead, you open up straight to the camera. Tap once to begin recording and tap again to stop. Choose a playback speed that you like between 1x-12x and tap the green check mark to save it to your camera roll. You can share your video on Instagram easily from there.

Like a lot of people working at the company, he’s also a photo and movie geek—and one of his longest-held affections has been for Baraka, an art-house ode to humanity that features epic tracking shots of peoples all across the world.

wired.com

By 2013, Dimson was at Instagram. That put him back in touch with Alex Karpenko, a friend from Stanford who had sold his start-up to Instagram in 2013. Karpenko and his firm, Luma, had created the first-ever image-stabilization technology for smartphone videos. That was obviously useful to Instagram, and the company quickly deployed it to improve video capture within the app. But Dimson realized that it had far greater creative potential. Karpenko’s technology could be used to shoot videos akin to all those shots in Baraka. “It would have hurt me not to work on this,” says Dimson.

wired.com

Inspired by a demo in which he saw gyroscopes attached to cameras to de-blur their images, Karpenko had an aha moment: Smartphones didn’t have nearly enough power to replicate video-editing software, but they did have built-in gyroscopes. On a smartphone, instead of using power-hungry algorithms to model the camera’s movement, he could measure it directly. And he could funnel those measurements through a simpler algorithm that could map one frame to the next, giving the illusion that the camera was being held steady.

wired.com

Instagram engineers Thomas Dimson and Alex Karpenko pitched the idea for Hyperlapse to employees back in January. The app became so popular internally that it was given the green light by Facebook to launch as a standalone app rather than a tool within the main Instagram app.

Hyperlapse from Instagram is available today for iOS devices in Apple’s App Store. It is currently only available for iOS.

Hyperlapse, which is now available for a free download in the Apple App Store, turns footage stored on your smartphone into time-lapse videos, without requiring pricey tracking rigs that can typically cost up to $15,000.

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The Hyperlapse app is now available for Apple devices that are on iOS 7.0+. Instagram plans to build an Android version, but there is no launch date yet. According to Wired, Google will have to make adjustments to the camera and gyroscope APIs to make it possible for Instagram to launch the same app on Android.