Are you familiar with a situation where you want to place a video in Instagram and it does not fit the vertical format of the stories or the square format of the main feed? Everyone who got into such a situation understood that the adaptation process turned into another quest. On the one hand, you can reduce it and the frame will fit completely, but then its attractiveness will be lost, and it will look like a “crutch”. Sometimes in such situations, users reshoot the video or just keep in mind what they are filming for, and immediately think about how to hold the smartphone in order to get the correct result. Google has taken care of this and now everything will be fine and free.
Crop is now easier than ever.
How to trim video
The above applies not only to placement in Instagram. TikTok and other similar sites have their own characteristics. All this is very inconsistent with the main rule of shooting a normal video. The TV is horizontal, the monitor is horizontal, the person's vision is peripheral. Therefore, video should be shot horizontally. This will make it much easier to watch on any screen.
In any case, no matter how hard you try, but always shooting a video in the correct orientation for all occasions will not work, and to crop it correctly, you can find special programs or do it in a video editor.
To do this manually is not very easy.
Many development teams work on the creation of such programs and editors. There is even Adobe among them. They all strive to make this process as simple as possible, and even better – generally automatic. Now Google has arrived with its solution.
The solution of its developers allows you to cut video to the desired format automatically, and even has an open source code that will allow anyone who wants to use the development. Application developers will even be able to embed such a tool into their products.
What is AutoFlip
The new platform was named AutoFlip, and its task, as mentioned above, is to automatically reformat videos without user intervention. For this, machine learning is used, which allows the system to understand where the person is or where the main action is taking place. After that, the original height of the frame is taken as the height, and the width is determined by the proportions of the required frame with its aspect ratio. The rest is cut off.
This is how the automation works in AutoFlip.
At the same time, there is something like a stabilization function that allows you to shift the final frame to the left or right within the initial frame so that the main action does not fall out of sight.
Once AutoFlip goes public, users will get different presets based on their needs. You can choose what you want and do it with only one video. That is, without reshooting the video every time, get material for posting on all social networks.
When will AutoFlip come out
Work on processing algorithms has not yet been completed, but it is underway. Moreover, Google is not opposed to participating in the improvement of third-party developers and just professionals in the video field. The source code is open and anyone has access to it, subject to the appropriate qualifications.
When AutoFlip is fine-tuned, it will hit hard on application developers who offer their solutions in this direction. As a rule, they are inferior to this promising development, and even cost money. Because of this, they will definitely lose, if not all, then certainly many of their clients. The blow will be especially strong if the algorithm works with photos as well. Well, what to do? Users are picky these days, and the competition does not spare anyone. But this proves once again that we only benefit from it.