My New "OM-F-G" Moment With YouTube

A while back Scott Adams (he of the Dilbert cartoon fame and massive fortune) blogged "How frickin' cool is that" (my post about it) where he talks about standing back from the tech and thinking about it for more than 5 secods and realising it is AMAZING!

Well, I had another of those moments today where technology is so cool and I have no understanding at how it works that it is pure magic.

The de-wobble (actual YouTube term, "stabilizer") feature when editing video (editing, via a web browser, video - how frickin' cool is that!) is incredible. It takes my, yours, everyones wobbly handycam video and smooooooths it out:

Stabilizer - Ever shoot a shaky video that’s so jittery, it’s actually hard to watch? Professional cinematographers use stabilization equipment such as tripods or camera dollies to keep their shots smooth and steady. Our team mimicked these cinematographic principles by automatically determining the best camera path for you through a unified optimization technique. In plain English, you can smooth some of those unsteady videos with the click of a button. We also wanted you to be able to preview these results in real-time, before publishing the finished product to the Web. We can do this by harnessing the power of the cloud by splitting the computation required for stabilizing the video into chunks and distributed them across different servers. This allows us to use the power of many machines in parallel, computing and streaming the stabilized results quickly into the preview. You can check out the paper we’re publishing entitled “Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths.” Want to see stabilizer in action? You can test it out for yourself, or check out these two videos. The first is without stabilizer.

Here's the original:



And now, with the stabilizer: