It’s been about nine months since Socialcam was acquired by Autodesk , and the company continues to innovate. It’s just released a new version of its iPhone app and has a new Android app coming soon. Even more impressive? The company is leaning on the expertise of its parent company to help improve things and boost the quality of videos that are produced.
For the latest release of Socialcam, the team took advantage of being part of Autodesk to improve the picture quality of videos that its users can shoot. According to co-founder Michael Seibel, Socialcam worked with people who worked on visual effects products at Autodesk to figure out better ways of processing video being captured within the iPhone app.
Together, they completely revamped video capture on of the app, making it a lot more efficient and capable of pushing higher-quality video.
The end result was an upgrade in quality for videos that users shoot with the app, now up to 720p. It’s also figured out a way to take advantage of the iPhone’s HDR functionality to improve tone mapping and color correction in realtime while creating videos. And a nice side effect of all this new high-quality video is that thumbnails displayed also look better, more appealing, almost like you want to click on them.
By improving video capture and adding HDR, “We can make the real world look a little bit better,†Seibel said, non-ironically. “If your phone can support HD video, we will shoot HD video.â€
Making it 720p means that video sizes are slightly bigger than is usual for the mobile video app, according to Seibel. But the addition of HDR won’t change file size at all, since all compression is done after HDR is applied.
In addition to higher-quality video processing, Socialcam has completely redesigned its visual effects â€" all the filters and themes that users can layer on top of their videos to make them more appealing. A lot of that change has revolved around making the visual effects a lot more subtle, to make them more compelling to use with a wide range of video types and styles.
According to Seibel, the idea is to help move users into the right direction when it comes to using filters and themes. The end goal is to “make it a lot harder to make bad videos,†he said.
In addition to the new iPhone app, the company is also working on improving its Android experience. Seibel said the team rewrote the Android app from scratch, fixing a number of compatibility issues and completely updating the UI. While it won’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles of the iPhone app, it should be a much better app than what’s currently available. Expect that on Google Play next week.
Socialcam is a new mobile video application coming to both iPhone and Android. Socialcam makes it fast, easy and fun to capture, share and view high quality movies of life’s moments with friends and family.
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