Google is testing a selection of powerful automatic tools that should make it much easier to edit videos in just a few taps.
According to a new report from Android Authority, Google is adding a new “Presets” feature that adds four new effects that can be automatically applied to any of your recorded videos. The features were discovered by prolific app investigator Assemble Debug, who enabled the unreleased features hidden in the code of the latest Google Photos Android app (version 6.97). This means the features aren’t yet available to users but will likely soon appear in a future update.
The four presets include:
- Basic Cut—to automatically clip out the most interesting section of a longer video (and also tweak the colors)
- Slow Mo—to add a slow-motion effect to a section of your video
- Zoom—to add a smooth digital zoom-in effect
- Track—to track a moving object, typically a person, in an existing video
You can see a short demonstration of the features in the video below:
Google Photos: New Video Editing Features
As shown in the video, the new controls are set to appear in a new “Presets” section that will appear whenever you tap “Edit” to edit a video. You should find it nestling between “Video” and “Crop” in the carousel at the bottom of the screen. When you receive the feature, a message should pop up saying, “New! Auto trim to key moments and add effects with just one tap.” Tapping on Presets will bring up the following options as mentioned above:
Basic Cut
After tapping on Basic Cut, the app displays a progress bar with the message “Trimming to key moment,” followed by “Enhancing colors” along with a progress bar. It takes about five seconds to process the seven-second video clip used in the demo, after which you can manually adjust the start and end points to fine-tune the results. I don’t know why Google has chosen to add a color-enhancement process here. I imagine there will be many situations where you’ll just want to trim a section of video without altering its appearance.
Slow-mo
Slow-mo lets you select a section within your clip that will play back in slow motion. You have to choose the slow-motion part manually, and there don’t appear to be any settings that would let you control the speed of the slow-motion effect.
Zoom
Similarly, the “zoom” effect lets you mark a section of your video, but this time, the view will smoothly zoom in by about 2x and then back out again at the end of your marked section. Again, it doesn’t look like the speed of the zoom effect can be altered; it’s just a quick zoom in and back out.
Track
It’s harder to determine what the Track function is doing from the video. Still, according to the report, it will automatically zoom in on and track a moving person within your video clip.
Unfortunately, you can’t combine all of these presets in a single video: The presets function is currently limited to Basic Cut plus just one from the remaining three options. However, any or all of these restrictions may change before the feature rolls out to users.
Editing video can be a little daunting to novice users, so it’s great to see Google include automated options like these. However, it remains to be seen how useful they will be in practice. For example, many video clips contain more than one “key moment.” It’s unclear how these new presets would cope with such situations. Users who need more advanced editing will have to switch to more capable applications such as Cap Cut or Adobe Premiere Rush.
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