Gyroscope stabilization from instagram - canon please implement this :D

[cerealito]

The guys from instagram recently released a new app called Hyperlapse for mobile operating systems.
Other than the obvious time lapse function, the app also implements a new kind of video stabilization "Cinema stabilization" - that uses data from the gyroscope (which most smart phones have these days) while down-sampling the video to obtain a very smooth video directly from the phone, without the need for other expensive equipment.

Read the full blog entry here:
http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/95922900787/hyperlapse

But do not miss this videos from The verge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0kZBwZZm44

and extra footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtWdEh2EAE8

Canon: apple started taking stuff from high end cameras to put them on their phones (dual pixel AF, IS...) it is time for you to start taking stuff from phones and put it into your cameras, please start with this

 

[tolusina]

I feel a phone cam sneer coming on, sorry in advance, hokay?

I, for one, welcome the plethora of phone cams and their massive proliferation, everyone has one everywhere, no scene escapes.
And then facebook, instagram, Flickr and the rest become inundated with phone cam output, um, er, ugh.

All this phone cam output makes the output from larger and far more capable cameras look all the more impressive in comparison.
Thank you phone togs for making photographers look so competent.

Time lapse, done, played, cliched. Less than 1% of the time lapse I've seen in the last year has been worth the click to view it. The links posted above? I want my clicks back.

Instagram, thank you, please keep it up.
Canon, thank you even more, please keep on.

 

[Coldhands]

Straight from the wikipedia article on lens-based IS:

Vibration is detected using two piezoelectric angular velocity sensors (often called gyroscopic sensors)...

Source - Glossary : Optical : Image Stabilization, Vincent Bockaert, Digital Photography Review

Gyroscope based stabilisation, no down-sampling required, and with the added bonus of working for stills as well. Seems Canon (and Nikon, etc) have done what you're asking several decades ago. If it's video-smoothing in post production your after, then that's been available via software for some time as well.

Kudos to IG for implementing this is a smart, easy-to-use package, but most of us DSLR users have had everything needed to do this for quite some time.

 

[dgatwood]

I'd much rather see Canon bake the continuous gyroscope data into the EXIF tags and leave the processing to computers that actually have the CPU power to handle it. Ideally, they'd downsample the video footage and compress it at somewhere around 1280p instead of 1080p, leaving a nice margin so that when you process the footage, you'd still have 1080p, and they would show you the center portion of that footage so that in the absence of massive correction, what you see would be the final, cropped output.

That scheme would also have the advantage of being able to correct more robustly by virtue of being able to look at the entire set of data rather than trying to guess whether that was a shake or a deliberate pan. And when compensating for a particular shake would cause a black border, if you're working with the data all at once, you can retroactively adjust the center of previous frames to avoid the problem, or at least smooth it out in ways that you cannot accomplish in real time.

And just to clarify, lens IS does do this, but it isn't really designed for video; it is designed for holding the image dead still. For video, it is suboptimal, because that usually isn't what you want. You want motion to be smoothed out, not eliminated. Otherwise, when you hit the limit of its range, you get a nasty jerk in the picture.

As for "no downsampling", you're downsampling anyway. Just about nobody shoots RAW video. And with the 16:9 aspect ratio, you're throwing away pixels on the top and bottom no matter what, even after downsampling, because you don't use the full height of the sensor. Those pixels could be made available for post-processing... essentially for free, without even needing to crop, though you would probably want to crop a little bit to accommodate horizontal shake. And because vertical shake usually has the highest amplitude, that's a real win.