Our latest app: Smooth Movie

Hey guess what?  Kabuki Vision has just released a new app and I’d like to tell you a bit about it.

Our new app is called Smooth Movie, and its job is to smooth out any shaky videos you record on your iPhone 3GS.  What do I mean by “shaky videos”?  Well, when you’re recording video on your iPhone, it’s hard to keep your hand super steady, especially if you are moving around at all.  This results in videos that look shaky.  Smooth Movie can process these videos, analyze the frames of the video, and create a “smoothed” version.  The camera movement will still be there, but it will be a lot less jerky, and a lot less distracting to the viewer.

So, how does Smooth Movie accomplish this?  We implemented an image stabilization algorithm which analyzes each frame of the movie, and tries to figure out how much the frame has moved relative to the previous frame.  It then adjusts the position and rotation of the frame in a way that minimizes the apparent movement.  There are many computer programs that do similar things…iMovie for the Mac can do this, for example.  But Smooth Movie is the first piece of software that can do this on the iPhone itself, which is much more convenient.  For example, you could shoot some video, run Smooth Movie on it, and then upload the result to YouTube, all on your iPhone.

Smooth Movie does take some time to process and smooth a movie, which is why we recommend it for short clips, rather than long movies.  We spent a lot of time optimizing the code to be as fast as it can be, including taking advantage of the NEON intrinsics that are available in the armv7 processor of the iPhone 3GS.

We hope you’ll enjoy Smooth Movie.  It really is useful for almost all handlheld videos taken on the iPhone 3GS.  And if you find it useful for your own needs, please tell you friends, and please consider writing a review on the app store.

On our Smooth Movie page, you can check out some sample movies that were processed with Smooth Movie.