testing out instagrams HyperLapse

Ok so instagram's Hyperlapse is not the same tech as Microsoft research's hyperLapse, but its free, and pretty cool.

What you are really getting out of the app is a somewhat steadied and smoothed out version of your video with the option to "time lapse it" but really this is more just speeding the footage up.  A big difference here is that the MS research will actually take out fast turns and bumps and look for a smoother path to follow. You don't get that with the instagram app, so any quick moves and changes are glaring . But hey, this app is free.. so you get what you get. 

 The most obvious difference from the start is that the output from the hyperlapse app is significantly reduced in size and quality.

The other thing is that the app seems to lock the exposure so you will not get good balance between darks and lights. I couldn't tell if there is an added filter to any of my videos. I don't think there is, I think it's just a result of the lock.   

I did find though that footage I shot on my bike handlebars , which is normally super jittery , was actually smoothed out pretty well.   

 

I filmed this kitesurfer this morning to see what some of the differences might be.. 

 For this clip I scaled down the "hand held" footage to match size and put them side by side. 

I have  an iphone4s so the native video size is 1920 X 1080 the instagram app scales the video down to 1280 X 720.

Resetting the pan zoom on a Maya camera

This seems to come up all the time.. so I'll share a quick script for resetting the pan and zoom of your current camera.
 for those that are interested, the settings for Pan and Zoom are on the camera's shape node under 2D Pan/Zoom 

Tab to create in Maya

This recently spawned in the "small annoying things" for Maya , and sparked a little buzz.

Creating nodes "nuke style" in the Node Editor is awesome.   So awesome that now everyone wants to do it every maya panel..   Sounds pretty good to me.

 For years I've had my ` key mapped to "set focus to command line"   and then typed in something like

`createNode multDoubleLinear`      For the longest time, that's the only way I used to actually create that node.. But the command line doesn't have autocomplete nor suggestion popups.


 As usual, someone has already tackled this and put it out there for public consumption.
 I haven't tried either of these scripts yet. but they look pretty cool

 active typing

http://josbalcaen.com/scripts/maya/gotyping/

quickLauncher

https://github.com/csaez/quicklauncher