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Microsoft "Hyperlapse" tech is finally available to play with

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MikleB:
G'day 4wd

So that's what Billy Goat Bluff Track looks like. Very interesting... Worked for 10 years with a bloke who regularly did some 4 wheel driving and he has talked about that drive a couple of times as he has done some tracks in the Alpine country. Bit of a photo buff and he has some stunning prints from around that area, mainly Craig's cabin and surrounds.

Just viewed both your videos on the descent you did and comparing them it seems that the Microsoft product looses a noticeable amount of detail and the colours are also a bit washed out but way smoother a view and a better experience from a casual observers point of view another post intimating that you have done a little more research into the results obtainable using a high definition camera and a few comments that I wish to explore a little if I may.

Been playing a bit more with Hyperlapse, (FHD up and down Billy Goat Bluff this time), and while it may produce good results it has some drawbacks, (AFAIAC), compared to increasing the playback rate in a NLE.

- Subtitles can't be burnt in to the source video because they will be effectively removed by Hyperlapse due to the way it works.  This means some tedious editing of external subtitles to get timing correct - the following two points make using external subtitles almost impossible.
- Instead of a constant rate increase you get a rather slow/fast effect, slow where the camera is panning, fast where it isn't - which can be quite annoying sometimes.
- The big one is you can't set a specific duration of the video, you only have a choice of x2-x25 which usually doesn't give the time that it should be.  This makes it very hard to match it up to an audio track.  Vegas I can at least specify how long the video is going to be down to a specific frame.
-4wd (June 18, 2015, 05:57 AM)
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 Regarding the subtitles, I presume you had to insert these into your Vegas video after shooting using Vegas itself (I know of the software but am not at all familiar with it.) and that the Microsoft software stripped it out during it's processing. I'm presuming you added the GPS stuff to the full normal speed video then processed the subtitled video using both software packages to get the shortened trips, or did Vegas (Another presumption on my part, it being that you mainly use Vegas and are just comparing it's timelapse capabilities to the output from the Microsoft Hyperlapse software.) add and shorten at the same time?

 Just trying to get a better handle on what I am seeing. If you did indeed need to do two passes, either for the software's sake (Can't add subtitles and speed up playback in the one pass.) or for your own archival needs (Want to keep the full, subtitled, movie but just want to have a quick little episode to show non-4 wheel drivers what you are up to out back {I mean this literally as I'm, just over the hill in Kilsyth  ;) .}  and not bore us. So added subtittles to the full movie and used that version for the shortened version on both occasions.)

 I ask mainly from the viewpoint that this is still software in development it seems and the crowd from Microsoft who are developing it may find experiences like yours very informative as to what they need to make it useable in the real world. They may have considered GPS subtitles but I'm not sure that the Go-Pro cameras have any GPS capabilities and I'm certain that many people who would use their software would use this feature to catalogue events they wish to keep whether Go-Pro's have this feature or not - there are other movie camera brands of course. Yes I'm a lapsed keen photographer and this kind of software is really interesting. I just feel that the earlier in development that these sorts of issues are raised then the better the solutions can be integrated into the final product.

 While watching and listening to your videos I had memories flood back of one earlier time that I first consciously recall this sort of road trip effect and that was the in 'The Hunter's and Collector's - The Slab' music video but that was not time lapse just edited segments, but used to good effect. Sorry for the rant but the Microsoft site states that they have a forum for this software and it really is an intriguing concept to have these sorts of capabilities in the average user's hands and I am trying, not so subtly, to get you to make your experiences known to them so that they may be able to incorporate some sort of secondary sub-processing channel just for subtitles to be kept and in sync. I feel however that it must not just be tacked on at the end as an afterthought.

 However in the mean time, I wonder if you are making two passes, then maybe it would be possible to process via the Microsoft software first and not apply any speeding up but just to see if smoothing can be applied firstly and then add the GPS stuff to this resultant video and then just do a speed up in Vegas and have the capability set a predefined time length. This process has now become a three pass one instead of two but if it's just a matter of starting it up and letting it run for each pass it might presently be acceptable for the odd video or two.

 Hmm, thinking on this, I see at least three process pathways that it might be possible to proceed along to get the some desired results and also that they all have there pro's and con's. How much time is involved, what quality losses occur, can manipulations in one process alleviate problems encountered in the other process if done prior to of alternatively after (I.E: Alternate processing orders.) and just what these might be for any given source video and required result... OK, before I get too bogged down, I must state that I may only look on in wonder as I only use a 32bit Windows XP computer so can't do any of these tests myself but would love to do so (I do have some video gear though, just a little antiquated for the types of trials that I would love to perform. Ah, more expenditure looming.  :(   at some point.)

 Pondering the panning speed up problem this I'm sure could be fixed in some pre-processing scenario, but now it becomes another 'pass' to go through but this time one that maybe only needs to be used to set timing marks as a pre-process, for rectification values if you get my drift, as an analogy, like is needed and done within CGI animation softwares for fly through's (I.E: If nothing new to see, go fast, if lots of new data, slow down but fit it all into the required 4minutes 22 seconds, start soundtrack at beginning, add narration tracks and backing tracks, add opening titles, sub-titles and end credits, drop in a still frame here, etc... And when all is ready, then do it all in one pass, but keep a record of the settings for reapplication if the results need tweaking.). Sorry but, these thoughts come to mind both as problems and solutions/ideas as to what would really be a - usefull - piece of software with lots of power but with simplicity built in (Heaps of core functionality, properly integrated and well laid out.).

 The thing is, IF Microsoft do polish this up and make a final release of it, then I'm sure someone else will bring out a competing product, without any guarantee that it would be a better product or of necessity a worse one... Who has the money to research like Microsoft can do? I feel the best outcome would be if Microsoft were to be given as much input as they could handle so as to be fully informed of any foreseeable requirements presented by the processes we users would wish to perform, then the more likely that their research team will see that the software itself is one that the community at large is keen to have made available to them, albeit improved upon in usefull and sensible ways, and as such will continue it's development from which we might see a piece of very usefull adjunct to home video production in this case. Home presentations to be effective need scripting just like a Hollywood movie, otherwise boredom can and often does set in. Seen a few sad affairs and some good ones too. Hyperlapse technology it seems would do a lot to help out in that area (Wether from Microsoft or not.).

 I hope that you do intend to address some of your concerns on the Microsoft site and hopefully receive feedback from the developers.

 I'll end here as this is enough from me indeed. Looking to see what thoughts you may have regarding these issues or just this piece of software in general from your further use of it.


MikleB

4wd:
{I mean this literally as I'm, just over the hill in Kilsyth  ;) .}-MikleB (June 25, 2015, 07:43 AM)
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Actually, you're not "just over the hill", you're down the bottom of it - I'm in Kalorama ;)

Regarding the subtitles, I presume you had to insert these into your Vegas video after shooting using Vegas itself ...
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The subtitles for that video were burnt into every frame of the original video using either ffmpeg or mencoder, (I forget which - one was definitely easier than the other though), the output being to uncompressed video to avoid recompression artifacts.
The video is then loaded into Vegas and then the playback rate is increased or decreased by holding down Control and dragging the end of the video one way or the other.  On rendering, Vegas (AFAIK) just does frame decimation in order to end up with specified playback length at the specified frames/second.  (BTW, Vegas 11 only allows a maximum 400% rate increase, I had to render, reload, and increase the rate again to get it to ~600%.)

eg.  A 4 minute video at 30fps when increased to a x2 playback rate will have half the total number of frames removed in order to play at 30fps in 2 minutes.

Doing it this way means that the remaining frames are left untouched, so the subtitles are still fine.

What I think MS Hyperlapse is doing (WARNING: simplistic theory following) is it does the frame decimation but then it uses tweeningw to create frames that morph the content between the original frames.  This results in burnt-in subtitles being morphed out of existence.  If you watch the video at First-person Hyperlapse Videos it's very noticable during the rock climb section (~1:55 onwards) where you can see rock formations and the other climber appear to morph between formations/positions.  Note, the default fps setting for MS Hyperlapse is 60fps, this gives them twice the number frames in which to make the result appear smoother.

During panning you have more movement (relatively) than forward motion so the number of inbetween frames created increases so the motion appears smoother and a small time stretch occurs.

I doubt there's anything that can be done about burnt-in subtitles that wouldn't require a massive rewrite to enable text detection within an area, and when that text is changing almost every frame I would think that the effort involved far outweighs the result.

So then, external subtitles - for the basic frame decimation that Vegas uses this isn't a problem as the playback rate is applied linearly across the whole video.
If the rate is set to x2, (assuming 30fps), then 15 frames will removed from each second of the original video and the time between each of the remaining frames will be halved - so the playback time is effectively halved.  Easy to calculate for use in external subtitles.  So easy I wrote two simple programs to do it for me.

With MS Hyperlapse, no such luck - the subjectively different playback speed between areas of low motion and high motion, (where extra frames need to be inserted to give the appearance of smooth motion), means trying to synchronise any external subtitle is a laborious job in text editing.  You'd need to keep referring back to the original video to locate a point where a subtitle should be, locate the same point in the Hyperlapse video, (within milliseconds), and edit the subtitle file with the subtitle start/end time.

If you're not referencing anything in the video, then you can get away with it.  However, for the stuff I'm doing it stands out like dingoes gonads, eg. the altitude reading is still increasing even though the video clearly shows I'm heading down the hill.

As an example, I'll upload a Vegas accelerated and Hyperlapse video some time in the next week or so that shows what using external subtitles looks like in each, (the Hyperlapse subtitles will just be auto-generated, no hand editing).

As for being able to specify a playback time for the end result, I'm not sure that could be done without increasing the number of passes the program needs to do, ie. it would have to run though choosing optimal frames to keep so it could generate a specific number of inbetween frames to end up with a specific playback time.

Finally, it should be noted that the only thing I did in Vegas was apply a rate increase.  I didn't use the Stabilize Media or any Video FX - that'll be my next experiment :)

Curt:
[deleted]

4wd:
Hyperlapse is scheduled for final release on October 01, after that you need to buy a license to export without a watermark.

Current preview version will let you export without a watermark until release date.



From a quick search I can't find a mention of projected cost but I hope it's reasonable, (just picked up a HTC RE for a really good price :) ).

JavaJones:
Oh bummer, wonder how much it will cost. I personally think it's a mistake to charge, they'll never make much money on it and they were getting lots of good press about it. Most people who will use it will probably be just home users who probably won't pay... My assumption anyway. We'll see. But they're certainly limiting their potential audience now...

- Oshyan

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