Report: Google Photos gets new one-tap video editing features
Google is testing a selection of simple new video editing features for Google Photos
Google is testing a selection of powerful automated tools that are designed to make video editing much easier with just a few taps.
According to a new report from Android AuthorityGoogle 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 that the features are not yet available to users, but will likely arrive soon in a future update.
The four presets include:
- Easy editing – to automatically cut out the most interesting part of a longer video (and also optimize the colors)
- Slow Mo – to add a slow motion effect to a section of your video
- Zoom – for a smooth digital zoom effect
- Tracking – to track a moving object, usually a person, in an existing video
You can see a short demonstration of the functions in the following video:
Google Photos: New video editing features
As shown in the video, the new controls will appear in a new “Preferences” section that appears whenever you tap “Edit” to edit a video. You should find it between “Video” and “Trim” in the carousel at the bottom of the screen. When you get the feature, you should see a message saying “New! Automatically trim to key moments and add effects with just a tap.” When you tap “Preferences,” you’ll see the following options, as mentioned above:
Basic cut
After tapping Basic Cut, the app displays a progress bar that says “Trim to key moment,” followed by “Enhance colors” and another progress bar. The seven-second video clip used in the demo takes about five seconds to process, after which you can manually adjust the start and end points to refine the results. I don’t know why Google decided to add a color enhancement process here. I imagine there will be plenty of situations where you’ll simply want to trim a section of the video without changing its appearance.
Slow motion
Slow-mo allows you to select a section of your clip to play in slow motion. You have to manually select the slow motion portion and there don’t seem to be any settings that allow you to control the speed of the slow motion effect.
zoom
Similarly, the “Zoom” effect lets you mark a section of your video. However, this time it smoothly zooms in by 2x and then zooms out again at the end of the marked section. Again, it doesn’t look like the speed of the zoom effect can be changed. It’s just a quick zoom in and out.
rail
It’s harder to determine what the track feature does from the video, but according to the report, it will automatically zoom in on and track a moving person in your video clip.
Unfortunately, you can’t combine all of these presets in a single video: the presets feature is currently limited to the basic cut and only one of the remaining three options. However, some or all of these limitations may change before the feature rolls out to users.
Video editing can be a bit daunting for inexperienced users, so it’s great that Google is including such automated options. 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 handle such situations. Users who need more advanced editing features will need to move on to more powerful applications like Cap Cut or Adobe Premiere Rush.
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