Cliplets - Blending Video and Photo's (Think "Intra-video still frame" or "Freezing parts of a video while letting other parts continue to play")

Inside Microsoft Research - Cliplets Blur the Borders Between Video and Photography

"With most digital cameras these days, you can shoot still photos or video. The critical question, then, is which one to use when you’re at your child’s soccer game or out with a group of friends: a picture often won’t do it justice, whereas shooting video can be quite challenging for the average person. A group of Microsoft researchers has now rendered that decision moot with a new interactive app called Cliplets.

Essentially, Cliplets allows you to take a snippet of video around 10 seconds in length and freeze certain parts of the frame, while allowing others to continue playing. The result is this really cool "photo" that blends the best qualities of still and dynamic imagery. The secret sauce behind Cliplet is computer vision, which allows the software to keep images aligned. You can see a demo of Cliplets in action with one of the researchers, Neel Joshi.

What’s really great is that Cliplets is available for download today from the Cliplets project page (also featured on the TechFest landing page). The team has clearly put a lot of work into this, also posting a series of tutorials, a support forum and a Youtube channel with a handful of sample Cliplets that give you a sense of what’s possible. Download it today and see for yourself

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Microsoft Research Cliplets (32 bit), Microsoft Research Cliplets (64 bit)

A still photograph is a limited format for capturing moments that span an interval of time. Video is the traditional method for recording durations of time, but the subjective “moment” that one desires to capture is often lost in the chaos of shaky camerawork, irrelevant background clutter, and noise that dominates most casually recorded video clips. Microsoft Research Cliplets is an interactive app that uses semi-automated methods to give users the power to create “cliplets”—a type of imagery that sits between stills and video from handheld videos. The tool provides a creative lens one can use to focus on important aspects of a moment by performing spatiotemporal compositing and editing on a video-clip input.

Watch the video above...

That's pretty neat isn't it? Added to my "play with this when I can" list. :)

 

NOTE: This is a MSR-LA licensed product, in short, non-commercial usage only.