Installing such app almost certainly implies that the user is aware of the problem of vertical videos. So being aware of it, they will simply rotate the device when recording (since it provides better quality/resolution).
It seems to me that it would be helpful if such idea is applied on the system level without the need for an app.
Horizon isn't just about vertical vs horizontal video, it's about either being skewed to a diagonal. Consider how many videos (whichever general orientation) wobble 5-20 degrees off axis; that's what Horizon solves.
Compare those professional "unsteady cam" shots where there's lots of horizontal & vertical movement, but never any tilt.
This is great! I'm very surprised that it isn't anywhere on the site. Instead the focus seems to be on horizontal photos, which seems ridiculous since anyone can flip their phone sideways.
Now this is a feature I would pay for. I think marketing it as fixing vertical video may be a miss, but marketing it as steady cam for your phone is killer.
This argument makes sense. However, it is more comfortable to hold the phone vertically even if you are aware of the Vertical Video problem. So, Horizon helps in these cases as well.
And even if you do hold it horizontally, you won't manage to shoot a perfectly aligned shot easily by yourself. For example, if you try to get a shot of a sunset.
This. I am completely aware of the problem of vertical videos, but constantly take them out of wrist/grip convenience.
I'm baffled as to why iPhone/Android doesn't offer a feature that allows you to toggle horizontal video from a vertical phone. I feel like that'd make 50% of smartphone videos infinitely more watchable.
Having a square sensor or a sensor rotating physically is a big tradeoff in cost or complexity. Until now no one cared to make these tradeoffs for large scale selling cameras, and the few attempts to fill the niche didn't seem to be so successful. I think in the photo world it's the same niche level as for true B&W sensors.
I hate vertical video and still end up taking quite a bit of it because the ergonomics of phones really encourage it for one-hand operation. Taking video horizontally with one hand on an iPhone is definitely not comfortable.
Is there a video hosting site that displays vertical videos without cramming them into horizontal frame?
I think lot of hate against vertical videos comes from the the way that youtube displays them.
I tried to create browser extension that displays vertical videos without the horizontal frame but I couldn't figure out how to determine orginal dimensions of the clip.
Vertical format was picked so that two people talking fit the frame. Today we more often see one person talk while being accompanied by non-video content (related, comments, slides, code). When single person talks (s)he's small and often accompanied by useless background on both sides, regardless of whether the video was recorded vertically or not.
I think that youtube went embrace (allow to upload), extend (by useless horizontal frame that makes the video smaller), extinguish (by the hands of all the people enraged by vertical videos due to previous stuff and the fact that people often use fullscreen on non-pivoting monitors).
I'm not so sure. When i facetime with family (on phone or laptop), i find the experience is strictly superior when in horizontal mode. There is something about gaining the peripheral context that makes the entire experience feel more natural.
Quite the trade-off, so instead of shaky unaligned horizons you now get irritating zooms effects [1], plus up to more than 2/3 of the original frame missing? (at least that's what the online demo represents).
At least the constant zooming could be easily lessened by defining a safe area of the frame as the active content while using the remaining sensor area for compensation only.
As a Horizon user, it bugged me that so much of the image was cropped to ensure stability (portrait width in landscape orientation - grrr). The rotate-to-zoom effect isn't perfect, but at least it gives the option to use more pixels when available (and I'll take zoom over wobble). Otherwise you're using an HD camera to take stable SD video.
You do have the option of turning off rotate-to-zoom and stick with the prior low-res stabilized image.
We have implemented a solution to the problem where the crop area zooms in/out smoothly in Flex mode, so that the wobbling problem is reduced. It will be available on the upcoming updates and in the Android version as well (hint! ;)).
In the meantime, you can switch between modes while recording depending on the situation. Finally, locked mode switches automatically to horizontal or vertical orientation in version 2.0.
Yes, the camera would have to physically rotate or stay level. Think of a film camera: holding the camera sideways means shooting in landscape at a 90 degree angle = instant portrait mode, no fancy software rotation effects required.
Alternatively, if we had a completely square sensor... though that still wouldn't help if you rotate at less than 90 degree angles.
Why can a software camera app be better quality than the original one, which is just supposed to feed data from the CCD to flash? You aren't interpolating, are you.
Even the original/stock camera app is a software app that processes the data from the CCD sensor before writing the final video file. For example, for stabilization, it interpolates the sensor input and executes image stabilization algorithms.
Horizon, processes the video input using the same tools that the default app uses to process video.
This is a very nice idea and should really be available in stock cameras. Maybe they could license it to phone manufacturers to include it in their camera apps?
Anyway, what I wanted to ask.. how do they go around the loss of quality? It's not a simple crop? Can they somehow utilize any part of the chip they want (as long as the maximum is the same?) since the chip is much bigger than the max possible video it can record?
License it? Is this such a revolutionary idea that other companies can't "invent it" themselves without licensing it?
This is an obvious idea that everyone has been craving for, and I don't think such ideas deserve patents. If stock cameras adopt this idea, tough luck, they'll just have to compete like everyone else and add more differentiation.
It's not the implementation that matters here, it's the idea. And companies can do their own implementations of it. They don't have to license it.
They may not have to license it, but for a reasonable price I'd rather use a well-implemented library that excels at what I need it to do and goes beyond, than spend time hacking up something equivalent but inferior (hey, I've got other stuff to do too).
Google+ already does something something similar, but not exactly. Ideas are obvious, implementation is everything. This product may or may not be a better implementation, and worth paying for. Inventors of advanced camera algorithms tend to get bought out or hired.
First of all, I was not talking about patents at all.
And my first assumption was that they do something more than cropping, in other words that the implementation is not trivial. But I learned that might not be the case.
> Anyway, what I wanted to ask.. how do they go around the loss of quality? It's not a simple crop? Can they somehow utilize any part of the chip they want (as long as the maximum is the same?) since the chip is much bigger than the max possible video it can record?
Who says they do? The app seems to show the entire input so I don't think there could be anything tricky in terms of using only part of the sensor.
When Crisp mode is used (in iPhone 5S), we use the full camera resolution (2592 x 1936 pixels) and after transforming it we project it to the output resolution (1080p, 720p). So, the final video is.. crisp :)
Great product, but a question about the trailer video...
Since the app seems to seamlessly adjust the picture so it doesn't rotate when you change the actual smartphone's physical orientation, what's the point of rotating the phone mid-shot?
Take the example of the two women sitting for coffee... why does the camera-person bother rotating the phone to horizontal in the middle of the shot? Why not just stay in place?
It feels like an attempt to battle the plague of vertical video and for that I'm thankful. Otherwise it's a great way to end up with a horizontally stable shot while allowing you to hold the phone any way that feels comfortable.
I can't think of any time when that isn't what I want.
I don't understand why otherwise savvy techy people ate so Luddite about vertical video. Adding an extra 200% of worthless landscape to a video of a person is an ancient plague that smartphones provided a cure for.
Goes back to why we switched to widescreen displays.
Area of vision man. It is not wasted space to see a horizontal plane, as that is what we expect to see when looking at anything. Vertical video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed door it is tangibly horrible.
Vertical video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed door it is tangibly horrible.
Horizontal video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed Venetian blinds it is tangibly horrible.
Now, is this any more correct? Or is it an equally arbitrary personal opinion?
The move to "wide" screen was also the move to short screen. I don't find anything natural about it; I expect to be able to move my eyes up and down as well as left and right.
A preference for short and wide screens seems more cultural than natural. Even granting that humans have better peripheral visions along the sides than top and bottom the current screens fall short in capturing this range.
My beef with most vertical videos is that people typically do not make good use of the format; there's nothing intrinsically bad or wrong about it.
No one said it was, so I'm not getting your point.
In another comment you said that 4:3 is a reasonable approximation of normal human visual field. 19:9 screens don't map to this; this restricted height works well for consuming certain current entertainment offerings but I don't see that a preference for it is objective.
If area of vision were guiding screen design we would likely see more of what the current Surface 3 offers.
Well, why are movies horizontally oriented? Why is the screen rectangular at all, and not square? Why were wide-screen movies such a big deal when they came out? Obviously it's because filling the viewer's visual field creates a more intense, immersive effect; engaging more of your peripheral vision makes you feel more like being there.
Vertical-format video has the opposite effect: you might call it anti-immersive. It boxes the subject up in an intrusive frame and makes you feel like you're looking through a hallway or some other obstruction.
The only problem I have with vertical video is that most screens are horizontally oriented, so vertical video always looks bad with tons of wasted screen space when viewed on anything other than the vertical smartphone it was recorded on.
I would want to rotate simply to get more resolution.. but then i'd wonder why i wasn't using the highest resolution from the start.. and then bam, i'm back to using the a normal camera app and holding it sidebars haha.
Though, i think i'd prefer this style app if it just picked portrait or landscape, and adjusted between just those two states dynamically. That would be nice if you accidentally shoot in one, and decided you wanted the other. Which happens quite frequently for me.
There's a mode that zooms in and out when you rotate. There's also another mode that just keeps it level, and there's no point in rotating it in that mode, you're right.
The downside of accessing the full sensor on the iPhone 5S is that image stabilization and rolling shutter compensation is not enabled. That functionality would need to be reproduced in software instead of the ISP hardware.
Hey randunel, this is Stelios from Evil Window Dog :)
The TechCrunch post you are linking to was posted back on our initial launch at January 14th. This video was shot with the first version of Horizon that didn't feature any stabilization. Moreover, our straightening algorithm has improved a lot since back then (6 months ago). Plus we are always working on updates to improve it even further!
Concerning the price, Horizon was always $1.99 but had a -50% off launch sale in the first month of its release.
The 2.0 update is a free update for all our of existing users!
It seems to me that it would be helpful if such idea is applied on the system level without the need for an app.