Google Autoflip Can Intelligently Reframe Video To Fit Aspect Ratios

| Published: Saturday, February 15, 2020, 15:02 [IST]

Google is offering a new open-source tool. Dubbed as Autoflip, the new tool is capable of intelligently reframe video to suit alternate aspect rations. The Google Autoflip could put bad cropping a thing of the past, especially for video content mobiles. Google announced the new tool is accessible to all now in a blog post.

Google Autoflip

Google's AI team working on the new tool to help make it easy for those editing video footage. Normally, the video footage shot for television and PCs come in 16:9 or 4:3 format. However, when it comes to mobile devices, which is much more popular to view content, the footages in a similar ratio seems slightly off to the end-user.

To fix this problem, video editors had to "manually identify salient contents on each frame, track their transitions from frame-to-frame, and adjust crop regions accordingly throughout the video." This not only required lots of time, but curators could spend time on other innovative work.

What Does Autoflip Do?

This is where Google's Autoflip comes in. The new open-source tool aims to fix this issue with a framework that applies video stabilizer techniques to keep the camera focused on what's important in the footage. Google explains that the machine learning-enabled object detection and tracking technologies to intelligently understand video content.

The team explains that the tool, built on the MediaPipe framework, is capable of adjusting the frame of a video on the fly. The interesting part is that Autoflip can automatically adjust between the scenes by simply identifying the "changes in the composition that signify scene changes in order to isolate scenes for processing."

Who Can Use It?

The tool analyzes every scene to determine if it should use a static frame or a tracking mode. The overall effect is that the tool is pretty neat and provides some obvious advantages, especially when dealing with static cropping of videos. At the same time, users should note that the tool is better suited for editing news footage and short videos like Snapchat videos.

Editing video content like TV shows would require much more professional tools as it's an important requirement to view an entire shot at once. The Autoflip source code is available to view on Github. There are also other detailed explanations and instructions about the new tool on the blog post.