Short of serving the popcorn, Magisto's editing app can take care of the video production needs for the busy (or artistically challenged), including helping with music choices, chopping it all together and even distributing it across video albums. However, one sorely lacking feature was the ability to include photos, which the developer has just rectified in its latest update with a "smart photo feature." After you pick your images, the system's algorithms "choose the most compelling moments within the pictures and videos, and automatically marry them in a narrative format," according to Magisto -- even matching photo and video subject matter via AI. From there, it'll add graphical themes, music and transitions to fill out the movie while you tend to more pressing matters. The iOS version is now at the App Store with an Android release arriving shortly, and the company said it'll soon add morphing, image foreground / background separation and other effects. If you want more than the five images the freebie version offers, you'll need to pay $18 a year for the premium app -- but all that extra free time should let you go earn the bucks to pay it off.
Filed under: Software
Sure, Magisto's automatic video editing algorithms are great for social media mashup clips, but what if you want to use the service's robotic sense of cinema to tell a story? CEO Oren Boiman says it's just what social video is missing, and has tweaked the service to fill the gap. Users now have access to a collection of themes to change how their footage is handled. The idea is to tip the algorithm in on the emotion the user is trying to convey, selecting "so cute" or "street beat" to cue it to select appropriately adorable or aggressive song suggestions, special effects or title treatments. The service also added a new video album feature, making it easier to organize and share videos with friends and family, and hopes to implement a collaborative editing system soon -- complete with post-production tools to tweak the computer's direction. Of course, you could always do things the old fashioned way.