Share Cinematic Videos With New App Hyperlapse

Instagram Moves On Video App Market

Sharing videos has always been a very hit-or-miss aspect of social media. Few of us have the skills or equipment necessary to shoot videos which don’t look like a barbeque-centric drunken remake of The Blair Witch Project, and so the idea of the ‘home movie’ has rather fallen by the wayside in favour of endless photo updates.

Instagram, however, believes that they have the answer. Just as they completely overhauled the idea of the photo on social media simply by adding filters and chopping it into a square to avoid the dreaded vertical shot, so too have they come up with a remarkably simple video app which looks set to be the first real challenger to Vine in the video app market.

Hyperlapse is an app for shooting ‘high-quality time lapse videos even while in motion,’ according to a press release on Instagram’s blog. The app allows users to create moving time lapse videos with something approaching cinematic quality – something previously only really possible with some rather pricey equipment.

Technically this is hyper lapse rather than time lapse; the former involves moving a camera across a distance as images are being shot, while the latter is static images taken over a period of time which are then put together and sped up to create the effect of video.

Hyperlapse works by utilising the built-in stabilisation technology of users’ phones rather than leaning on scenic clues like changing angles and high contrast tracking points, as most professional-level video equipment does. The advantage of this technique is that it is far less energy-intensive, and so won’t be such a drain on your phone’s battery, as well as allowing for a more lightweight app which can lean on increasingly sophisticated mobile hardware rather than having to concern itself with constantly updating its own technology.

This is the second stand-alone app which Instagram has released, following the unveiling of Bolt last month. But while Bolt was effectively just a Snapchat clone, possibly released as part of Facebook’s attempted take-over of the ephemeral photo messaging app, Hyperlapse is a genuinely original and innovative product.

Early reviews are favourable, with people noting the simplicity of use which earned Instagram its good name. It also doesn’t require a sign-up, or that you have an Instagram or Facebook account – a refreshing change in an era when most social media seems to want to bind your various platforms together, although who knows how long this will last.

While Hyperlapse will be a separate app, it won’t be its own social network; users will have the option to share their videos on Facebook or Instagram. In this sense it seems to be a further step on the road towards the evolution of the social network as something more amorphous, a conceptual linking of different aspects of communication rather than a single definite platform.

Interestingly, Microsoft announced a concept for their own video smoothing technology, also called Hyperlapse, earlier this week. It seems as though Instagram got the jump on them as far as actually releasing a product, and if the whole Snapchat/Bolt debacle taught us anything it’s that the app which gets the users first tends to keep them.

Douglas Clarke-Williams

Douglas is an English Literature graduate who has written about everything from music to food to theatre, now a content creator for Social Media Frontiers. No topic too large or too small. Follow him @DouglasAtSMF.

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