Magisto
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Daily iPhone App: Magisto takes your best camera roll picks and turns them into an eye-catching video
If you want to quickly fire off a montage of your favorite photos and videos, then you should check out Magisto, the magical video editor. Magisto lets you choose photos and videos that you want to compile into a shareable clip. Instead of having to splice the video and add all the snazzy effects yourself, Magisto does it on your behalf. You mark off your photos and videos, select some background music, pick a theme and the app does the rest. It'll chop up your video, mix in some photos and glue them all together with a handful of fancy effects and filters. Each clip takes less than five minutes to process. While you wait, you can check your email or browse the web, and Magisto will alert when your clip is completed. The end result is a compilation that you can share publicly with the Magisto community or privately with family and friends. Quality-wise, the final clip is creative enough to be entertaining, but it won't win an Academy Award for its effects. I tested the app with a handful of my iPhone 5s photos and videos and overall was pleased with the output (view my sample clip), with a one caveat. I liked how the app chose to mix the video and photos with the just right balance of media types. Some of the transitions, though, are a bit too choppy for my taste and don't smoothly flow a video into a photo or vice versa. The beauty of Magisto, though, is that you can start over, choose a new theme and have another clip in just a few minutes. Magisto is available for free in the iOS App Store. The app allows you to create a clip with five photos and 10-minute/10 video clips for free. If you want additional photos or longer videos, then you must upgrade to the paid version. Subscription plans include a one-month subscription for US$4.99 or a year subscription for $17.99. The service also requires you to sign up for an account if you want to share your clip. If you just want to play around with the app, you can do so as a guest.
Magisto adds still photos to its AI video editing witchery (video)
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.
Magisto sharpens its AI video editing algorithm, adds themes, albums and group editing
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.
Magisto edits videos automagically, deluges the interwebs with idiot auteur savancy
Oh, the plague of social media and its irrational empowerment of at-home, amateur media moguls. Well, truth be told, not everyone has the tenacity to sit and slog through hours of footage to create a skillfully made, ready-for-prime time upload. Not to worry you talentless hacks, Magisto's got a web-based tool that'll automate your lack of video editing expertise, and churn out YouTube-worthy, ADD-style clips replete with background music and fancy multi-window effects. The service, which makes use of an algorithm to recognize "people, pets and landscapes and can even...[analyze] sounds and images," had formerly been available in a private beta, but is now open and free to anyone with a camera, a computer and a decent internet connection. We've seen the results of the company's handiwork and it's all pretty much the same thing -- an incoherent, tune-laden mashup. Which is to say, ideal for the Twitter and Facebook IV drips we've come to subsist upon. Go ahead and test the hyper-editing software out at the source below -- it's not like you actually have to do anything, anyway. Just click.
