New Microsoft Technology Might Make Your GoPro Footage Actually Watchable

I do this weird thing where I take a GoPro on the golf course. It’s not because I love doing trick shots or utilizing bunkers as launch ramps for my golf cart — it’s because I want to look at my swing. One of my biggest issues this season is transferring success on the range to success on the course. I record portions of my practice sessions, but didn’t have anything with which to compare those recordings. So I now take my GoPro out on the course and record a few shots here and there to see how they compare with my technique on the range. It’s dorky, I know.

And while I like walking a course when I’m by myself, I’ll take a cart if I’m with a group. I don’t get as much exercise, but I’m not slowing everyone else down. The cart makes for an excellent GoPro tripod (quadpod?) so I’ll just clip the camera on there and let the recording roll. When I go through the footage, there’s a bunch where the cart is just rolling along. Some of it is boring, but sometimes the camera catches an interesting view or a pretty sunset as we’re meandering down the fairway. I always think this would be cool footage to share, but, well, it’s so dang long. Unless the viewer has some sort of ASMR reaction to video of fairways and sounds of the wind, no one is going to sit through the whole thing.

I imagine that those who participate in real action sports — you know, the people GoPros are intended for — feel the same way. Footage of downhill skiing can be cool, but it can also be quite long and tedious. Microsoft is working on technology that would help alleviate this situation by shortening and smoothing action video.

The software is called Hyperlapse, which conspicuously shares its name with a similar solution from Instagram. Microsoft takes the technology a little further, however. While Instagram’s Hyperlapse will simply just cut out frames to produce a time lapse, Microsoft’s version will pick out the smoothest and most important frames. According to Engadget:

In the mobile version of the app, instead of speeding up the footage by only keeping every tenth frame (for example) Hyperlapse only preserves frames that appear to visually follow the camera’s estimated path through the landscape. By removing wild card frames with sudden jerks or movements, the sped-up footage ends up being automatically smoothed and stabilized. As a result, the faster you decide to speed up your video, up to 32X, the more watchable the results will be.

Hyperlapse comes in two flavors; a mobile app for Android and Windows Phone, and software for PC. No word yet on iOS compatibility, but given Microsoft’s recent push to embrace the platform, I imagine one is coming soon. The PC version is currently a preview version of professional software, so expect that to cost some kind of money at some point in time. The PC version is the most obvious choice to edit footage from a standalone camera like a GoPro, but GoPro’s app does allow exporting to phones which could theoretically be imported into Hyperlapse. A Dropbox/Google Drive option could work as well, perhaps. You can see how well the software translates what would be puke-inducing time lapse video into something much more watchable.

A lot of action footage videos are a lot like vacation photos — they help you remember great times you had, but no one else really wants to see them. By giving us an easy way to edit and smooth this footage out, Microsoft is helping to create more dynamic and engaging material for us to email or post to YouTube. I’m not 100% sure it will help make my golf footage interesting, but I’ll still probably give it a try. I just finished a round on one of the hilliest courses I ever played. Perhaps that will make for some interesting footage when put through Hyperlapse. If not, it will still be more interesting than the source material. And certainly more impressive than my score that day.